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books by dr. McClelland 



THE MIND OF CHRIST 

An Attempt to Answer the Question, 
What Did Jesus Believe? 

12mo. $1.25, Net. 

THE CROSS BUILDERS 

A Study of the Various People 
Concerned in Jesus* Death. 

1 2mo. 50 Cents, Net. 

VERBA CRUCIS 

A Meditation Upon What 
Jesus Said on Calvary. 

12mo. 50 Cents, Net. 



Thomas Y» Crowell & Co,, New York 



THE MIND OF 
CHRIST 



AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION 
WHAT DID JESUS BELIEVE ? 



BY 

t. calvin McClelland, d.d. 

MINISTER OF THE MEMORIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF 
BROOKLYN-NEW YORK 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



t> 






Copyright, 1909 

By Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 

Published September, 1909 



Ci. A. 24 4536 
AUG 3 1909 



TO 

James Cruikshank, LL.D. Walter S. Finlay 

George M. Van Deventer James F. Atkinson 

Howard Haviland Alfred G. Reeves 

ruling elders in the 

memorial presbyterian church 

brooklyn-new york 

this book is inscribed with appreciation 

gratitude and affection 



PREFACE 

The following pages are an attempt to inter- 
pret in plain speech the belief of Jesus. There 
attend upon the worship of every church numbers 
of strong, spiritual people who are not confessed 
followers of Jesus, because they misunderstand 
Him and what He stands for. Christianity, as 
they understand it, means something unintelligible 
or unpractical. The religion they need is one 
which they can confess with all their hearts not 
only, but also with all their minds. The religion 
they want is one which will make a vital difference 
in their " yeses " and " noes," their loves and hates, 
a religion through which they shall work right- 
eousness, from weakness be made strong, wax 
valiant in fight, turn to flight armies of distress 
and injustice. For these and for all earnest people 
who want to get at the rock-bottom facts of 
Christianity I have ventured to make this inter- 
pretation of the mind of Christ. 

Jesus was the first Christian, the kind of 
Christian men want to be and ought to be, the 
kind of Christian men can be if only they will 
think His thoughts, feel His feelings and give 

v 



VI PREFACE 

themselves up to His master idea. This then, is 
the vital thing to know, What did Jesus believe? 
What did God mean to Him? How did He think 
of Himself and of His fellow men? These are 
the fundamental questions of modern religion. 

In what I have written I disclaim all controver- 
sial intent. The thing farthest from my thought 
is to suggest, or to arouse debate upon any theory 
of the Person of Christ. For myself none of the 
creeds, nor all of them put together can adequately 
express my adoration of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
But in these chapters I would so present Him that, 
whatever one's personal metaphysic of Christ, he 
may unite in the " Song of a Heathen, sojourning 
in Galilee, A. D. 32," 

"If Jesus Christ is a man, — 
And only a man, — I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 

If Jesus Christ is a God, — 

And the only God, — I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 

The earth, the sea, and the air." 

I cannot forbear expressing my great gratitude 
to two friends who among many others gave me 
suggestions which have been worked out in these 
essays. The one is the beloved Charles Cuthbert 
Hall, who in his beautiful life and death witnessed 
so splendidly to his belief in the supreme Lordship 



PREFACE Vll 

of Jesus. The other is the Rev. Prof. George Wil- 
liam Knox, D.D., whose monograph in " The 
Christian Point of View " gave me the idea for 
the eleventh chapter, and whose " Direct and 
Fundamental Proofs of The Christian Religion " 
gave me material for the last essay. 

T. Calvin McClelland. 

Memorial Church Manse, 
January 25, 1909. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Jesus' Idea of God i 

II. Jesus' Idea of Himself 19 

III. Jesus' Idea of Man 51 

IV. Jesus' Idea of Religion 69 

V. Jesus' Idea of Sin 85 

VI. Jesus' Idea of Salvation 99 

VII. Jesus' Idea of Prayer 117 

VIII. Jesus' Idea of Immortality 133 

IX. The Proof of Jesus' Idea of God . . . 153 

X. How a Man May Know the God and Fa- 
ther of Jesus - . 167 

XI. The Seriousness of Believing in the God 

and Father of Jesus I7 9 

XII. The Religion of Jesus the Absolute Reli- 
gion 193 



IX 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 



"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? and not one 
of them shall fall on the ground without your Father : but 
the very hairs of your head are all numbered. , ' 

" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask 
him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for 
a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know 
how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more 
shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them 
that ask Him?" 

"Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? 
or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be 
clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek; 
for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of 
these things." 

"Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute 
you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; 
for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Ye therefore 
shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." 

" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 

" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." 



THE MIND OF CHRIST 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 

The fact of life is God. The question of life 
is, what is God ? Only the " fool hath said in his 
heart, There is no God." Science believes in God ; 
it gathers and sifts the facts of nature and human 
nature and says, " we are ever in the presence of 
an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all 
things proceed." Philosophy believes in God ; it 
makes nations and individuals pass in review be- 
fore its stand and reports that there " is a Power 
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." 
Poetry believes in God; it searches the hearts of 
things and men and sings, 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the 

plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?" 

Every man believes in God. When Voltaire 
bought the manor of Ferney he found the parish 
church in bad repair. He had it torn down, and 

3 



4 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

in his own park, at his own expense he built a new 
church, and over its door he carved, " Deo erexit 
Voltaire/' He, who orthodoxy said was the syn- 
onym for " Satan, Death and Sin/' dedicated a 
church to God. Every man has some sacred 
shrine for God, an unknown God maybe, but God. 
Every man has some solitude which he dedicates 
to God, not my God maybe, but God. Every man 
is conscious that he has more relationships than 
those he comes to by birth and marriage. The soul 
feels an ' Over-Soul ', a ' Something There ' not 
flesh and blood, on which he knows he and his 
destiny depend. Experience certifies the Psalmist 
true when he says, " Out of the depths have I 
cried unto thee, O God." This is incurable in 
man, the sense of a superhuman. The fact of all 
facts is God ; the question of all questions is, what 
is God ? for the old saying " as the man, so his 
God," is just as true turned end for end, as his 
God, so the man. 

So the most searching question we can ask about 
Jesus is, what is His idea of God? When we get 
Jesus' idea of God, we get His idea of Himself, of 
man, of religion, of sin, of salvation, of life, of 
prayer, of immortality. 

First, after the manner of artists, we must get 
in our background that we may have a due sense 
of proportion and perspective for the figure which 
shall stand in the foreground. We must get the 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 5 

idea man had of God before Jesus came. Man's 
earliest idea of God was, the Powerful One, the 
Strong, the Almighty. Omnipotence was the first 
quality discovered in deity; force got the first 
worship. God was a splendid despot, He was the 
glorified sheik of the tribe. In some of the earliest 
narratives of the Bible we get glimpses of this 
primitive idea. In these stories God shares 
names with the pagan divinities. He is called 
" Baal " and " Elohim/' names that signify the 
terrible and majestic. The oldest specifically He- 
brew name for God is " El," which means " The 
Strong," and this alternates with the poetic " Zur," 
" The Rock." A favorite patriarchal name was 
" El Shaddai," which might be translated " The 
Irresistible." Among primitive peoples names 
were not mere tags to designate objects ; they were 
word pictures; they told you something about the 
nature of the things named. A name for God was 
really a confession of faith, a creed about Him. 
But, all of these first names for God stood simply 
for almighty power, absolute sovereignty. In 
them the children of Abraham confessed their 
faith in the Omnipotent. They saw Him in the 
thunderstorm, the lightning and the fire; they 
thought of Him as their leader in battle; they 
devoted to Him in slaughter their prisoners of 
war; and they thought of Him as claiming the 
sacrifice even of human life as the loftiest expres- 



6 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

sion of a man's devotion. I believe in God as 
Power was the first creed of the race. 

But a better day dawned. The Omnipotent 
was seen to be the Omniscient, and the God of 
Power was believed to be the God of a Plan. 
When men made that discovery or how no one 
can tell; but sometime, the Bible seems to say it 
was in Moses' time, the Hebrews got a new name 
for God, the august name written in our English 
Scriptures " Jehovah." " God spake unto Moses 
and said unto him, I am Jehovah : and I appeared 
unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as El 
Shaddai; but by my name Jehovah I was not 
known to them. And God said unto Moses, I Am 
that I Am : and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto 
the children of Israel, I Am that I Am hath sent me 
unto you." This was the Hebrew's greatest name 
for God ; they cherished it so, that by an$ by they 
would not speak it aloud, and in course of time its 
pronunciation was forgotten. The meaning of the 
word " Jehovah " is probably " He who is and 
causes to be," or " He who lives and causes life." 
It implies personal will, irresistible and trust- 
worthy. It was a great day when " El," the 
Strong, was found to be " Jehovah " the God with 
the Purpose. Worship of force, even though it 
were celestial force, brutalizes character ; and faith 
in a glorified tyrant becomes apathetic or despair- 
ing acquiescence in fate. But if the Almighty 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 7 

is also the All-knowing, if the Strong is also the 
God with the Plan, then His sovereignty is not 
whimsical, and His rule is not chance. Life 
might still be a mystery, but it is not a chaos; 
there may be a riddle of existence, but He holds 
the key. Jehovah was to be feared, but more, He 
was to be served with trembling hope. I believe 
in God the Almighty Proposer and Disposer was 
the second creed of the race. 

Then great prophets came, and they unveiled 
another great characteristic of deity. They said 
the Almighty Jehovah is holy. Jehovah is the God 
of righteousness, who requires of men that they 
not only fear and serve, but with justice obey. 
The All-powerful and the All-purposeful was seen 
to be the All-perfect. Men like Hosea, Isaiah and 
Micah discovered a conscience at the heart of the 
universe, a conscience like man's conscience at its 
best. God was the source of all justice, the sov- 
ereign adjuster of life's unjust and arbitrary dis- 
tinctions. This was the sublimest God-faith of 
Israel. It meant that the world was steeped in 
morality; that right is higher than might. This 
idea laid its masterful hand on the spring of the 
feelings and set men trying to live a life that like 
Job's could see all that he had made and loved 
swept away like dust before a whirlwind of divine 
purpose and yet say, " Though He slay me yet 
will I trust Him." It was a glorious day when 



8 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Jehovah was seen to be just, and the plan was 
known to be fair. It gave men the quiet feeling 
that comes to those who once walked armed to 
the teeth, but are now settled under a government 
where there may be lawlessness but no anarchy. 
I believe in the Almighty Jehovah, the Perfect ; in 
the God of the Power, the God of the Purpose, the 
White God, this was the third creed of the race. 
It was the best creed the world ever had. It was 
a wonderful idea of God ; its masculine vigor and 
ethical grandeur reached down into the deeps of 
life and quickened amaze, reverence and awe. 
But at the same time, this idea of God swept up- 
ward like the peak of Teneriffe, majestic, dimly 
outlined, mist-draped, inaccessible from the cold 
surge of life which washed restlessly about its 
base. 

This was the creed Jesus learned at His mother's 
knee. For Jesus, God was real and living. He 
did not argue that God is. He ignored atheism; 
indeed it seems as if He took it for granted that 
all men believed that God is. He accepted the 
ancient creed. He contradicted no one of its 
sublime conceptions. He confessed " the God of 
Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob." His God 
was sovereign, all-wise and just. The mountain 
peak stood in the landscape of His belief, but He 
lifted upon it the light of a bright new day, and 
before that genial ray, the once mist-draped, in- 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 9 

accessible peak rose clear and winsome, an upward 
slope, but a gentle slope, from whose base to sum- 
mit ran a climbing path with many a rest-house 
for the weary and heavy laden. God is all-power- 
ful, all-wise and all-perfect, said the ancients. 
God is our Father, said Jesus, and power, wisdom 
and perfectness are the attributes, the tools with 
which the Father works. Fatherhood is the mind 
and heart, the attributes are the hands and feet 
Fatherhood was the idea in which, for which and 
by which Jesus lived. 

It was not that Jesus made the name " Father " 
brand new. Other men had used the term. 
Homer called Zeus the father of gods and men. 
The Cilician poet, Aratus, quoted by St. Paul, 
wrote, 

"With Zeus are filled all paths we tread and all the marts 

of men; 
Filled, too, the sea and every creek and bay; 
And all, in all things, need we help of Zeus; 
For we too are His offspring." 

Plato and Seneca used the word " father," and 
with the Jews the metaphor was classic. Moses 
employed it, and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the 
Psalmist and the unknown prophet of the exile. 
Sometimes the name refers to God as the supreme 
ruler, sustaining toward Israel the same relation 
that a father sustained toward a Jewish family, 
that is, the head of the house. Sometimes the 



IO THE MIND OF CHRIST 

name goes deeper and describes God's mystic fel- 
lowship with His people. Sometimes, as in the 
apocryphal books, it is used to express God's 
kindly attitude toward the pious individual. At 
the time of Jesus the words " Heavenly Father," 
and " Our Father in Heaven " had become a popu- 
lar substitute for the old name of God, which had 
fallen into disuse. So the mere name was not 
original with Jesus. But granted that one cannot 
claim for the Master's use of the name any verbal 
originality, still is Jesus' God- faith brand new, His 
idea original. 

What God meant to Jesus, God had never meant 
to any one who lived before Him. It was not 
what He said that was new and original, but it 
was how He said it: how his God idea and His 
feeling and willing acted and reacted on each 
other ; how this name " Father " became in Him 
the inspiration of a new kind of living; how He 
inspired others with His own secret, until they 
believed their own souls and others worth while, 
able to live an eternal kind of life in the midst of 
time. Granted that Moses and Plato, Hosea and 
Sirach called God father, no one of these men, nor 
any of their followers responded to this father idea 
as did Jesus. They said father, but they lived as 
if they meant lord. Jesus said Father, and all men 
felt that for Him it was the only divine name, the 
working idea of life — God's and man's. For 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 1 

others the Fatherhood of God meant creatorship, 
redeemership, lordship, even mercy, forgiveness 
and love ; for Jesus Fatherhood meant fatherhood, 
that unique, intimate, reciprocal relationship which 
exists between a father and his son. For others 
Fatherhood was a possible characteristic of God; 
for Jesus Fatherhood was the positive character of 
God. Thus far the God-seekers had discovered 
only certain qualities of deity, Jesus unveiled God 
Himself, and men said, " God is love." It was 
like this. Three men go into a room. Lying on 
a table in that room is an object no one of them 
has ever seen before. One says, this object is 
hollow; another says, this object is wooden; an- 
other says, this object is brown. Each one speaks 
truly; the object is hollow, and it is wooden, and 
it is brown. But no one of the men nor all of them 
together has told us what the object is in itself. 
They have discovered only certain qualities which 
the object possesses. The object is still unknown 
to us. At last there comes into the room a fourth 
man; he approaches the object on the table; with- 
out a word, he lifts the hollow, brown, wooden 
thing and nestles it close to his throat, and then 
across it, back and forth he draws a bow, and the 
music leaps out and opens heaven, and we see the 
angels ascending and descending. The first three 
named three characteristics of this interesting 
object, the fourth man let us hear the object sing 



12 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

of its inmost self, and we said to ourselves, it is a 
violin. 

Men said, God is all-powerful and He may be 
fatherly. Jesus made us know that our Father 
is all-powerful. They meant God's character is 
power, and one characteristic may be fatherliness. 
He showed us that God's character is Fatherhood, 
of which one characteristic is power. It all comes 
out in that wonderful prayer which Jesus taught 
to His disciples. "After this manner therefore 
pray ye: Our Father who art in heaven, Hal- 
lowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us 
this day our daily bread. And forgive us our 
debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And 
bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from 
the evil one." The apostrophe, " Our Father," 
gives rise to all that follows. That name is the 
most high and hallowed thing in the mind of the 
man who utters it. 

The Fatherhood is the source and satisfaction 
of the soul who prays. Out of that Fatherhood 
spring the divine kingship, the divine will, the 
supply for daily living, the infinite functions of re- 
pair and redemption. The man who prays this 
prayer believes not merely in a reign of law, but 
in the reign of a Father through law; he believes 
not in bare sovereignty to which all things must 
yield because the sovereignty is irresistible; but 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 3 

he believes in the sovereignty wherein there are 
no subjects, only sons. He knows himself safe, 
not because his king is fatherly, but because his 
Father is kingly. Here is Jesus' idea of the divine 
omnipotence. The Jew taught that God was first 
king, then kind; Jesus has made us believe that 
God is first kind, then kingly. The Jew believed 
that fatherliness was an imperial favor which the 
great king might dispense; Jesus believed that 
Fatherhood was the mainspring of the divine 
character, the beating heart of the Eternal. 

Men said, the God of the plan may be fatherly. 
Jesus made us know that our Father is the God 
of the plan. They meant God's character is om- 
niscience, and one characteristic may be fatherli- 
ness; He showed us that God's character is 
Fatherhood, of which one charateristic is wisdom. 
We get His point of view in that beautiful saying, 
" Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? and 
not one of them shall fall on the ground without 
your Father : but the very hairs of your head are 
all numbered." Here is an assurance that the 
plan is no mere architect's design, once finished 
and then left to hirelings to carry to completion, 
while the designer sits in his sanctum far away 
from the building's dust and noise. The plan is 
the Father's purpose for His dear household, and 
the architect's eye, and the architect's hand " go 
as far as our fears go, nay, as far as life itself — 



14 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

life down even to its smallest manifestations in the 
order of nature." 

Here, indeed, was a new thought. The Jews 
of Jesus' time had the idea that God's busi- 
ness with men was carried on by angelic messen- 
gers. God Himself might send, but God never 
came. They saw no present deity, but they were 
expecting one. Jesus saw the Father everywhere. 
God had not stopped working, He was busy in 
the field and the sky, the sea and the soul. God 
had not ceased speaking; He Himself, and not 
angels, spake in the lily and the bird, in conscience 
and the human voice. Jesus found men thinking 
of God as a consulting engineer, an absentee gov- 
ernor; He left men thinking of God as the ever- 
present Father in whom " we live, and move, and 
have our being." 

Men said, God is holy, He is perfect, He may 
be paternal. Jesus made us know that our Father 
is holy, our Father is perfect. They meant God's 
character is all-powerful, all-wise perfection, which 
may be uttered in fatherliness ; Jesus told us that 
God's character is Fatherhood, which utters itself 
perfectly. The idea of God's absolute whiteness 
was the highest ideal the race had imagined; but 
it left life cold and lonely. The thought of God's 
perfection lifted God out of man's reach; He was 
high as heaven, what could one do? deep as hell, 
what could one know? The idea of the divine 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 5 

perfection awakened in the soul the sense of per- 
sonal unfitness, despicable meanness, which put 
an impassable abyss between God and man. God 
and man were more profoundly separated by the 
moral antithesis of good and bad than they had 
been before by the antithesis of strong and weak, 
all-knowing and ignorant. Then Jesus came and 
He had another definition of the divine perfect- 
ness. " I say unto you, Love your enemies, and 
pray for them that persecute you; that ye may 
be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He 
maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Ye 
therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Fa- 
ther is perfect." Here is a new definition of the 
divine perfection; it is the habit the Father has 
of making His sun to rise on the evil and the good, 
the way He is used to sending His rain on the 
just and the unjust. This is holiness, as the 
Master understood it; not ethical separation, nor 
moral transcendence, nor inimitableness of char- 
acter, but bountiful, impartial, ungrudging benefi- 
cence. To bless without stint, to bless thus, the 
unjust as well as the just, to love the unlovely, to 
pray for the persecutor, this is perfection, God's 
perfection, and so man's. God is our Father of 
unbounded, gratuitous, ungrudging love. This is 
Jesus' idea of God. 

It was this Father Jesus lived to unveil. This 



1 6 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

was His life's purpose, to get men to say, " Our 
Father," and saying it, to believe that they were 
talking directly to the Infinite and Eternal source 
and satisfaction of nature and human nature, and 
believing it, to live in the world as children in a 
Father's house, free from care and full of love. 
How strongly He Himself believed in His God- 
idea, we feel when He says, " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father." These words are not 
strange except as we make them so. He and His 
disciples were not talking about Himself. "Shew 
us the Father," Philip had said. They wanted 
something that they could see that would help 
them to understand the Father whom they did not 
see; and that is what Jesus gave them, the one 
thing He knew which was most like God, Him- 
self; and so He said, " He that hath seen Me hath 
seen the Father." No plain man hearing another 
speak those words would interpret them to mean 
that the speaker meant that He and His Father 
were the same person. He would understand that 
the speaker meant that He and His Father agreed, 
that they had one thought, one feeling, one way 
of acting. Here is a man; you never met his 
father ; you admire the man and wonder what sort 
of person his father is. I know the man's father, 
and I tell you, " When you see the son you see the 
father; he is the father's double; he has his accent, 
his expression, his manner." You understand 



JESUS' IDEA OF GOD IJ 

that I mean that the son is the living picture of his 
father. That is what Jesus meant, when He said, 
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," 
that is, I am the Father's double, He thinks as I 
think, He feels as I feel, He does as I do. 

Nothing that God is contradicts what Jesus was. 
Nothing that Jesus was belies what God is. Jesus 
is so much like God that we have to find out only 
what Jesus was to know what God is. Let us 
take one action in His life. He had gone about 
doing good. He had never claimed His rights, 
He had never reckoned what he might get in re- 
turn for His service; He had never cherished an 
insult; He had never nursed a grudge; He had 
never seemed to see anything in the men about 
Him but their need of the good things He had to 
give away. They crowned His brow with a 
wreath of thorns; they stripped Him of all His 
earthly estate, that cloak that was pure white 
woven without seam; they hung Him by four 
wounds between two thieves; and while they 
were doing it, He talked to His Father, 
talked to His Father about the traitor friend 
who had made his best friend a bargain, 
about the churchmen who had by perjury secured 
the verdict of death, about the Roman whose 
cowardice had put the finishing touch upon the 
ghastly parody of law, about the crucifiers who 
were the tools in the red hands of those who 



l8 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

wrought this crowning tragedy ; and this was what 
He said to His Father, "Father, forgive them; 
for they know not what they do." He believed 
that God was such an one as could be talked to 
that way; that God felt as He felt; that God is 
forgiving as He was forgiving; that God is the 
Father of unbounded, gratuitous, ungrudging love. 
That is why ever since, we have said, we see 
God in Jesus, we find Christ in God. For all 
practical purposes of living God is Jesus. Some- 
how on that belief the facts of life fall into order 
and the soul breathes deep and slow a peace which 
passeth understanding. We may live our lives 
without care, they are in the Father's strong hand ; 
we may live our lives without fear of the future 
or any change, the way of the pilgrimage is 
marked down on the Father's wise plan; we may 
live our lives with cheer, the Father loves as Jesus 
loved, to the uttermost. 



II 

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 



" Knew ye not that I must be in my Father's house ? " 

" All things have been delivered unto me of my Father : 
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and 
who the Father is, save the Son; and he to whomsoever 
the Son willeth to reveal Him." 

"As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus 
commanded them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until 
the Son of man be risen from the dead." 

* Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness 
to be tempted of tne devil. And when He had fasted forty 
days and forty nights, He afterward hungered. And the 
tempter came and said unto Him, If thou art the Son of 
God, command that these stones become bread. But He 
answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by 
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God. Then the devil taketh Him into the holy 
city; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and 
saith unto Him, If thou art the son of God, cast thyself 
down; for it is written, He shall give His angels charge 
concerning thee: and, on their hands they shall bear thee 
up, lest haply thou dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus 
said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not make 
trial of the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh Him 
unto an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all 
the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he 
said unto Him, All these things will I give thee, if thou 
wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto 
him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt 
worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." 

u I ascend unto my Father and your Father." 



II 

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 

The Gospel of Jesus was good news about God. 
It was not Himself that the Master seemed inter- 
ested in, His theme was the Father. His desire 
was not to get men to call Him Lord, but to get 
them to do the will of His Father. But as one 
cannot get the grain without the sower, so one 
cannot know the Father without Jesus. He is in- 
dispensable, and what is more, He knows He is 
indispensable ; " He that soweth the good seed," 
said He, " is the Son of Man." Buddha, Plato 
and Socrates are contented to be a mere factor in 
their message; Jesus knows Himself to be His 
Gospel's personal realization and dynamic; as one 
says, " He knows no more sacred task than to 
point men to His own person." Given the other 
God-seeker's message and we can do without the 
messenger; would we have Jesus' message we 
must obey the call " Come unto me." So it is 
we must ask, what place Jesus believed He Him- 
self had in His Gospel; what was Jesus' idea of 
Himself? 

21 



22 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Across the water is a great cathedral. You 
have seen pictures of it; you have read about it 
in books of art and travel. You think you know 
it. You shut your eyes and imagine the glori- 
ous fagade, the lacelike sculpturing, the fine east 
window, the upward sweeping towers. One day, 
you cross the water and visit the great cathedral. 
As evening gathers you approach the minster. 
There against the blue-black sky leans the beauti- 
ful pile. It is more than you dreamed. Sud- 
denly there is a glimmer within, long shafts of 
light break through the windows, and figures of 
saints and angels gather in the radiance. On 
the still air the notes of an unseen organ float, 
deep as the thunders from, a purple cloud, sweet 
as the trilling of birds at twilight. The cathe- 
dral speaks for itself. No one could tell you what 
it tells. With its own light and harmony it re- 
veals its transcendent function. We have seen 
pictures of Jesus, we have read the books of His 
interpreters; now we come to Jesus Himself; like 
cathedral light and harmony His own life and 
words flowing from His soul speak to us of Him- 
self, tell us what He believed about His being and 
function. 

There is a picture in the cathedral which hangs 
just where it is the first thing we see as we enter. 
Mary and Joseph had brought the boy down to 
Jerusalem. While there they lost Him. They 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 23 

searched for Him everywhere. Hoping against 
hope, Mary came to the temple. There only the 
grey-beards and the great were used to gather to 
converse about God's high things and man's deep 
things. But, there, at home in that company, His 
face upturned to drink in their speech, His breath 
drawing deep and slow was her little boy. He 
wondered only that on missing Him, Mary had 
not instantly inquired at the temple ; she must have 
known about His absorbing interest in God's busi- 
ness ; " knew ye not that I must be in my 
Father's house?" This picture of the boy who 
cared more about God's things than anything, who 
could not help wondering about the difference be- 
tween Himself and His mother is the key to the 
cathedral of His consciousness. That absorption 
in God's business which marked the lad became in 
the man an absorption in God ; " all things " said 
He " have been delivered unto me of my Father : 
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the 
Father ; and who the Father is, save the Son ; and 
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." 
At first sight there may seem nothing es- 
pecially significant in this self-consciousness. 
The thought of God as Father He shared with 
others. He could say with them, He taught them 
to say with Him, " Our Father." But as we 
listen we catch a something about Jesus' " My 
Father," a depth of meaning, a richness, a ring 



24 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

which no one else can put into the words. He 
said no one can say " my Father " as He can, " no 
one knoweth who the Father is, save the Son." 
Though with His strong arm around them He gave 
the saintliest and the shamefulest confidence to re- 
peat after Him, " Our Father ", yet He was con- 
scious of a relationship with the Father which 
they did not share. There was a difference be- 
tween the best and Him. His sonship was more 
than theirs, so much more that He knew Himself 
to be taking only His proper name when He called 
Himself " the Son." 

Here is a paradox in Jesus' self-consciousness. 
While He made humility well-nigh the grace out 
of which everything good grows, yet He named 
Himself, and Himself alone "the Son"; others 
were sons, but for Himself He must use the defi- 
nite article. His sonship was more than other's. 
Jesus knew, because no one knew the Father save 
the Son, and of course he to whom the Son would 
reveal Him. That is, the Father idea was His 
discovery, to others it must always be a revela- 
tion ; He knew it by instinct, they must be given it 
by instruction; the Father He knew from the be- 
ginning, others were only beginning to know ; the 
Fatherhood which was so patent to Him, to 
others was brand new good news. While the rest 
of the children were thinking of God just as 
King, and of themselves as the King's subjects, 



JESUS" IDEA OF HIMSELF 2$ 

He knew God as Father and Himself and all men 
as sons, and so He could say " my Father " as 
no one else could, and for this cause He knew 
His sonship must be greater than theirs. 

His sonship was greater than other's, be- 
cause the love of Father and son which for them 
was one-sided, was perfectly reciprocated in Him. 
As yet the love between the Father and men 
was all on the Father's side. From the first 
Jesus loved the Father as the Father loved Him. 
Here is the wonder of Jesus' self-consciousness, 
its august self-complacency. He whose presence 
made the good say, " depart from me, for I am 
sinful," challenged the good to convict Him of 
sin. Was he separate from sinners, so was He sep- 
arate from saints. Saints reached goodness only 
through fires of remorse and baths of penitence; 
He said simply, " I do always the things which 
are pleasing unto the Father." Once He laid 
down the terms of true sonship, " love your ene- 
mies, and pray for them that persecute you; that 
ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven " ; 
all needed to be summoned to reach out to his re- 
lationship, all but He. Face to face with death, 
in that hour when the conscience of the morally 
quick man inexorably sums up his life, Jesus 
seemed to feel only the moral need of His mur- 
derers, and then knowing that He had never edged 
off from perfection's standard, conscious that He 



26 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

had realized the ideal, He said, " It is finished." 
He was the Son; men were becoming sons; He 
was full-grown; men were waiting to be born. 
Jesus believed Himself to be " the Son of God." 
But while He called Himself " the Son," He 
seemed to know no difference in kind between 
Himself and the other sons of the Father. If 
He was " the Son of God," He was also " the 
Son of Man." Indeed Son of God was not His 
self-designation; His favorite name for Himself 
was " Son of Man." There is one scene in His 
life which brings this feeling about His human re- 
lationship to the surface. He and three of His 
students were on a mountain somewhere in north 
Palestine. Suddenly, the disciples see, or think 
they see, their blessed Lord in the company of 
Moses the great law-giver, and Elijah the great 
prophet. And in a moment a light lighter than 
the midway sun breaks forth from their Lord and 
outshines the law-giver and the prophet as the 
midday sun outshines the ever shining planets. 
And a great voice is heard, " This is my beloved 
Son." Then it is written that this divine Lord 
said, " Tell the vision to no man, until the Son 
of Man be risen from the dead." They had 
recognized Him as divine; He cared more that 
He should be known as human. "Son of Man" 
is His own name for Himself; translated into our 
speech its simplest meaning is a standard human 
being. 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 27 

Let us call Jesus what names we will, Christ, 
Lord, Son of God ; these names fit the fact ; but He 
calls Himself " Son of Man," the standard human 
being. Exalt His difference as we will He ap- 
pears to care more that we shall exalt His hu- 
manity. We exalt the difference; He exalts the 
identity. We cherish the divinity; He cherishes 
the humanity. We call Jesus divine and we 
know we are true ; He calls Himself human and we 
know He is true. And then we put the two 
ideas together and call Him the Divine Man. 
Does that mean that part of Him is human, and 
part divine? Nay, it means that humanity and 
divinity are so alike that Jesus could be both in 
one homogeneous life. We mean that humanity 
and divinity overlap so that here is no telling 
where one begins and the other leaves off. The 
difference between humanity and divinity is a 
difference of degree; divinity is humanity raised 
to its highest power; humanity is divinity in the 
germ. So the divine Christ makes no claim to 
be a foreigner from some far off unnatural world, 
a sort of spiritual wedge driven into the common 
human nature. His divinity did not make Him 
something other than human; our humanity does 
not keep us something other than divine. The 
path is open all the way to the summit. It is no 
farther from the bottom to the top than it is from 
the top to the bottom. Jesus believed Himself- 



28 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

to be " the Son of God," but He believed Him- 
self to be the brother of men. 

Jesus believed Himself to be the Father's mes- 
senger Son sent to recover the lost children. In 
our cathedral stands a two-leaved door. It is 
between the vestibule where hangs the picture of 
the little Galilean seeking His Father's business, 
and the great fane where are the altar and the 
sacrifice. The carving on one leaf of this door- 
way tells a story like this. For nearly a score 
of years after that memorable visit to Jerusalem, 
Jesus lived in the village of Nazareth. For us 
those are hidden years; what went on in His in- 
ward life we may not know, but we may be sure 
that those years brought to the growing man an 
ever deepening passion for that business which 
absorbed Him as a lad, " the Father's business." 
At last, one day, news came from the southland 
of a strange preacher who called himself " a 
voice," and the message of this voice was " the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand." It was the sort 
of message Jesus had been listening for; it was 
just the tocsin to stir the pulses of one who was 
consumed with a passion for the Father's busi- 
ness. Spirit answered to spirit; the message of 
the preacher claimed the soul of the Carpenter. 

But the preacher did not only preach, John Bap- 
tist was forming a society; it was a community 
of expectant souls pledged to this imminent king- 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 29 

dom, and the ancient rite of baptism was the form 
of initiation into its fellowship. With complete 
humility, eager to leave nothing undone which 
would work toward the great consummation, 
Jesus sought initiation into this society of the 
kingdom, He requested baptism. " And Jesus, 
when he was baptized, went up straightway from 
the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto 
Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending 
as a dove, and coming upon Him ; and lo, a voice 
out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved 
Son, in whom I am well pleased.'' Whatever the 
dove and the voice were, they were the outward 
symbols of a genuine inward experience, an ex- 
perience of which there can be only one interpre- 
tation, Jesus was conscious that He was what 
His race called the Messiah. 

That Jesus believed Himself to be the chosen 
Messiah there can be no question. Toward 
the end of His life, while in the neighbor- 
hood of Csesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples 
one day what opinions the people held about 
Him. They told Him that some thought Him 
to be John Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one 
of the prophets. And then He put to them this 
question, " But who say ye that I am?" And 
Simon Peter answered and said, " Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the living God." For a Jew 
that confession could have only one meaning, thou 



30 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

art Messiah. The human voice identified what the 
divine voice had discovered to Him at His baptism, 
and " Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed 
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonas, for flesh and 
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father 
who is in heaven/' Thus Jesus solemnly confirmed 
the truth of what Simon had said and seriously ac- 
cepted the designation of Messiah with its im- 
plication that He stood in a closer relation to God 
than do all other men. Five days before He died, 
He rode into Jerusalem setting Himself into all 
the symbols with which the prophetic imagination 
had decorated the expected one, and thus in a 
way that no one could doubt claimed the august 
office for Himself. 

Jesus believed Himself to be the Messiah, but 
the question arises, what kind of a Messiah did 
He believe Himself to be? The ideal of Messiah 
in Jesus' day, though universal was very vague, 
very elastic. But all the speculations about Mes- 
siah and what he should be and do were set into 
one golden frame ; the Jews believed that a golden 
age was coming. For centuries the land had 
been heartbroken. One by one the nations of the 
world had made sport of it, despoiled it, trampled 
it as they trampled the grapes to make wine for 
their royal banquets. But the Jews hugged the 
hope of that golden age to their bruised breasts. 
In Jesus' time the hope was a belief that God 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 3 1 

Himself, or if not God, then some one like God, 
would come down to champion Israel, overthrow 
Caesar, make the ancient kingdom to be the ad- 
miration of the world and bring earthly plenty, 
glory and ease to the children of Abraham. With 
such a Messiah every Jew would sit in his own 
vineyard, under his own figtree enjoying the 
fruits of peace. A few of the people like John 
Baptist earnestly believed that a revival of real 
religion had to come before this golden age could 
be, and as earnestly wrought to prepare them- 
selves and others for it. But withal the ideal 
Messiah was just a Jewish Caesar, mightier than 
Caesar even and certainly more moral. How 
much of this popular ideal was a part of Jesus' 
idea of His Messiahship? We find the answer to 
this question in what is called the Temptation. 
We turn to the second leaf of the golden doorway 
of our cathedral. 

Three of the gospels report an incident in Jesus' 
life which followed immediately upon His bap- 
tism. St. Mark in the briefest way makes men- 
tion of the fact, but emphasizes its significance by 
setting it as the starting point of his memorabilia. 
St. Matthew and St. Luke describe the event with 
warm Oriental language. Their narrative lifts 
the curtain on a tragedy of the inward life. One 
cannot get away from the feeling that what they 
write about was something very real and very 



32 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

awful, something which actually took place, some- 
thing which involved tremendous consequences. 
It was no dream, no figment of the imagination; 
it was a crisis out of which Jesus came a changed 
man. The movement is dramatic, the climax is 
decisive, the details are picturesque. This is nec- 
essarily so; the story cannot be looked at as if it 
were a photograph. You cannot photograph a 
soul. It were impossible for us to have the record 
of an eye-witness. In this supreme experience 
Jesus was all alone. What the disciples knew 
about the Temptation, they must have heard from 
the lips of Jesus Himself. 

It is told us that in His early teaching, Jesus 
always spoke in figurative language, " without a 
parable spake He not unto them." They were 
like children. To make them appreciate the in- 
ward, the spiritual, He was used to employing the 
kindergarten method, the story way of teaching. 
And so the account of the Temptation is to be 
read like a parable. Jesus had to " thing " it so 
that they could think it. The picturesque de- 
tails, the realistic setting, the dramatic movement 
are to be understood as an attempt through the 
form of picture to make intelligible for simple 
minds a high mystical experience. As Frederick 
W. Robertson says, " The whole majesty of the 
Temptation is destroyed if you understand it lit- 
erally." The artist Tissot has the sense of it. 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 33 

Interpreting the words, " Straightway the Spirit 
driveth Him into the wilderness/' Tissot pictures 
Jesus as borne swiftly on the finger-tips of a gi- 
gantic spectre; but when you look closely you 
see that this great spectre is just the shadow of 
Jesus Himself. 

The Temptation occupies a significant position 
in Jesus' career. It stands like a door between 
two rooms, the one a dim, small, meagrely fur- 
nished chamber; the other a stately, vaulted hall, 
flooded with light, lined with great pictures and 
furnished with exquisite care. On the one side of 
this door is the simple Carpenter of Nazareth, the 
dutiful son of Mary and Joseph busy with the 
common duties of a mechanic's day. On the 
other side of this door is the Teacher, the Christ, 
the Victim, the light and life of men from whose 
mystic spell the race would not if it could with- 
draw. On the one side of the Temptation is the 
silence of the hidden years of childhood and youth. 
On the other side of the Temptation is the au- 
gust claim to be the Son of God, the unveiler of 
the Father, the opener of the eternal to the sons 
of men. Before the Temptation, little that His 
closest friends thought worth recording; after the 
Temptation sayings and doings which were they 
written about every one, " I suppose " says 
the man who knew Him best, " that even the 
world itself would not contain the books- that 



34 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

should be written." Evidently this Temptation 
is something very great, something that must be 
understood to understand the life of Jesus. 

And first we must find out what led up to it. 
Jesus spent His boyhood and young manhood in 
the little town of Nazareth. The village lay then 
as it does now, in a cuplike hollow of the Galilean 
hills. These hills which ring it round like a giant 
breastwork defend it from the outside world and 
made it a natural hermitage for one whose bent 
is meditative. But just over the edge of this hol- 
low, at the summit of these hills upon the south, 
there runs a great cleft across the country from 
the sea-coast to the Jordan valley. And through 
this cleft lies the chief highway between the East 
and the West. A little climb from the heart of 
the village brought one in sight of a panorama of 
" the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them." For standing on the hills above Naza- 
reth and looking southward one could see wind- 
ing their way along this ancient trunkline the 
caravans, whose unceasing movement mingled the 
peoples of the earth. Moving like colored beads 
upon a thread of gold there were travellers and 
merchants, messengers and slaves, and citizens 
and haughty officials and soldiers of that proud 
Roman race which held the world enthrall. 

Here was ample environment for the culture of 
a soul. In the little hilltown was the solitude for 



JESUS 9 IDEA OF HIMSELF 35 

tne quickening of the spiritual sense, and just 
a step away was the stirring atmosphere of the 
thronging world, the unveiling of the race. In 
this seedplot Jesus grew secretly and silently. No 
eye may search out the subtle agents which in 
the workshop of His soul wove those vast ideas 
and ideals which made Him what He was. The 
process we may not trace, the result we know. 
Still this much we may know, He learned as all 
Hebrew boys learned by heart the collection of 
the sacred writings. They were not only the lit- 
erature of His nation, its history and poetry, but 
they were its law-books, its religion's text-book. 
He drank deep draughts of those dear dreams and 
hopes which all Hebrew mothers kept clean and 
bright in the cupboard of their faith. With the 
home for a schoolroom Mary and Joseph were 
His preceptors. He was no son of the schools, 
no pupil of the Rabbinic teachers, no novitiate 
of the priesthood. The years drew on, bringing 
with them, we may not know what eagerness for 
the fulfillment of His race's dream, of the golden 
age, of its usher and king, the great Messiah. 

And then of a sudden in the lifting of an eye- 
lid, out of the arching heavens into His inmost 
soul came that astounding discovery, the golden 
age had come, and He was the Messiah, God's 
beloved Son through whom the other sons were 
to participate in the Kingdom of God. He went 



36 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

down into the Jordan the Carpenter of Nazareth, 
He came out of it the conscious Messiah. The 
discovery overwhelmed Him. He the mechanic, 
the son of Mary and Joseph was the Father's Son, 
the expected Messiah! Could it be true? That 
was the vital question. The settlement of that 
question with all it involved was the Temptation 
of Jesus. The soul in Him needed a loneliness 
where He might think, where He might meet the 
issue and define His function. It was an awe- 
some awakening, from mechanic to Messiah, and 
straightway the Spirit in Him drove Him into 
the wilderness, and He was there in hunger and 
thirst of soul, there testing Himself and that stu- 
pendous self-discovery, there in sweat and blood 
of spirit, until at last He had solved these prob- 
lems, — What was Messiah's work ? Under what 
conditions must He do Messiah's work? What 
methods must He as Messiah use? 

In the Gospel story the scene shifts three times. 
First we read, " And when He had fasted forty 
days and forty nights, He afterward hun- 
gered. And the tempter came and said unto Him, 
If thou art the Son of God, command that these 
stones become bread. But He answered and 
said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God." He was the Son of God, 
the question was, what was the Son to do? 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 37 

Wholly absorbed in His thought Jesus forgot 
food, till at last He faced stark need. Hungry 
and with not a morsel to eat; hungry and yet 
God's Messiah! What a contradiction! How 
inadequate His life equipment to fit the dream of 
His people. They were looking for, He Himself 
had been expecting, a Messiah who should bring 
with Him earthly plenty, prosperity and peace. 

What was it Isaiah said, " The Spirit of the 
Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath 
anointed me to preach good tidings unto the 
meek; He hath sent me to bind up the broken- 
hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and 
the opening of the prison to them that are bound; 
to proclaim the year of Jehovah's favor, and the 
day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that 
mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn 
in Zion, to give unto them a garland for ashes, 
the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise 
for the spirit of heaviness ; that they may be called 
trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, 
that He may be glorified. And they shall build 
the old wastes, they shall raise up the former deso- 
lations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the 
desolations of many generations. And strangers 
shall stand and feed your flocks, and foreigners 
shall be your ploughmen and your vine-dressers. 
But ye shall be named the priests of Jehovah ; men 
shall call you the ministers of our God; ye shall 



38 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

eat the wealth of the nations, and in their glory 
shall ye boast yourselves/' 

That was Isaiah's ideal of Messiah and what 
Jesus had been taught to look for. But what a 
contrast! Could He be the bringer of earthly 
prosperity and temporal ampleness while He Him- 
self was famished for food? Could He offer 
Himself to His countrymen while He was dying 
for the simplest necessity of life? Would they 
believe in Him? Could He believe in Himself? 
unless, there was in Him some strange new power 
by which He could turn nothing into abundance! 
How eagerly the thought would insinuate itself, 
Messiah may be able to turn stones into bread; 
such an ability would commend Him to Him- 
self, commend Him to His nation. But, as 
eagerly came another thought, the remembrance 
of an old word which Moses had spoken, a word 
which He Himself had proved valid in His own 
experience, " Man shall not live by bread alone, 
but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." Now He saw clearly; the nation's 
ideal was low ; they had let their hopes twine about 
things earthly while their hopes should have been 
spiritual. The deepest need of their life was God; 
their insatiate hunger was for the spiritual; a 
man was not a body; he had a body, he was a 
soul; if the soul died the man died, even though 
the body was glutted with plenty. 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 39 

Should Messiah have power to make stones 
bread, this would not prove Him Son of God; 
though men needed bread, though houses and 
lands, peace and industrial success were imminent 
necessities, still men needed more, freedom from 
sin, power for goodness, knowledge of God, knowl- 
edge of themselves as sons of the Eternal. And 
He who would save men must have the richness to 
fill these inward wants ; He must be ready to give 
life to men's souls, the life which bread cannot 
keep going, the life which is nourished by the 
word of God. Not to feed bodies but to feed 
souls, was Messiah's mission; not to the outward 
but to the inward was the Son of God sent. The 
question was, should He be the Messiah they 
looked for, or the Messiah they needed? Should 
He save the outward or the inward life? Should 
He be a mere bread-winner or a life-giver ? That 
was the problem He solved for Himself with 
those great words, " Man shall not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God." The time was expecting an 
industrial reformation; Jesus saw that His was to 
be a spiritual reformation ; they were asking easier 
lives, Jesus was to give them holy lives; they 
wanted to be saved from Rome; Jesus was to 
save them from themselves. 

The second scene in the Temptation is told in 
these words, " Then the devil taketh Him into the 



40 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Holy City; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the 
temple, and saith unto Him, If thou art the Son 
of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He 
shall give His angels charge concerning thee : and, 
on their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply 
thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said 
unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not make 
trial of the Lord thy God." The question of the 
nature of Messiah's work settled for Himself, 
Jesus had to face another problem, under what 
conditions was He to carry on this work of spirit- 
ual redemption. His ideal of Messiahship would 
seem revolutionary; it would be exasperatingly 
disappointing to His countrymen with their Mes- 
sianic idea of world-power. They would flock to 
Him expecting to be fed, and He would have to 
say, " Work not for the food which perisheth, 
but for the food which abideth unto eternal life, 
which the Son of Man shall give unto you: for 
Him the Father, even God, hath sealed " ; and 
would He be able to prove to them that He was 
sealed ? When they would demand, " what then 
doest thou for a sign, that we may see, and be- 
lieve Thee?" would He be able to prove His 
eminence by making some unnatural draft on 
Providence ? 

He would go to the Holy City to claim the 
men there for His Father's kingship; other men 
had gone to Jerusalem to do this same spiritual 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 41 

work, and in disappointment Jerusalem had killed 
their prophets and stoned them that afore- 
time were sent unto her. Would he have 
to work under their limitations, or could 
He expect miraculous intervention? There, 
for instance, was that high place at the south- 
eastern angle of Herod's temple. Suppose they 
should in exasperation drag Him to that pinnacle 
to fling Him down into the Kedron, flowing four 
hundred fifty feet below, would the Father 
intervene in His behalf? The Psalmist had sung 
of Messiah, " He shall give His angels charge 
concerning thee: and, on their hands they shall 
bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against 
a stone." He was God's Messiah; could He 
claim that promise? Caught there between earth 
and heaven, by the unseen hand of His Father 
would He not verify His Messiahship beyond a 
doubt? Such a spectacle would silence all ques- 
tion as to His power to give life; it would give 
authority to His word when He bade men think 
not of mere daily bread, but of the word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 

But in a flash there came to Jesus another 
thought. He remembered how when the fore- 
fathers were coming out of Egypt, they lighted 
upon a place where there was no water; and be- 
cause they could get no drink for themselves and 
their herds, Israel cried out in doubt and anger, 



42 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

" Wherefore hast thou brought us up out of 
Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle 
with thirst? Is Jehovah among us or not? " He 
saw those Hebrews testing God by their narrow 
ideas of Providence, putting the idea of God's 
care and purpose to the trial of a mouthful of 
water; and in their ingratitude and faithfulness, 
He saw the reflection of this suggestion which 
had come to Him that He challenge the Father 
for some demonstration that He was the Son of 
God. And as if that thought were a serpent He 
flung it from Him saying, " Thou shalt not make 
trial of the Lord thy God." It was the great 
word Moses had given Israel reminding them of 
their distrust, and Jesus took it up and assimilated 
it to His own experience. The issue stood be- 
fore Him naked, His work was spiritual, its con- 
ditions must be spiritual. He would seek no ex- 
ceptional privilege, He would expect to be saved 
from none of life's hardship and peril, He would 
ask for no supernatural endowment, He would 
toil as a man, be a brother to want, sorrow and 
blame; it would not be Himself He would seek 
to save, His search would be for others. He was 
the Son of God, the messenger Son sent to recover 
the lost children. 

These questions concerning the nature of Mes- 
siah's lifework and its conditions settled, was 
He carried away with a rapture of impatience 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 43 

to win the world for His Father? What a great 
world it was to win! Standing on the hill-top 
near Nazareth, on the edge of the Plain of Es- 
draelon, He had seen the world in miniature pass 
in review in those ceaseless caravans that used the 
highway between the Mediterranean and the Far 
East. From that point of vantage He had been 
carried often on the wings of imagination to the 
utmost limit of time and clime. Now looking 
into the serious eyes of His Messiahship, He 
could see again what He had seen from His native 
hill-crest, " all the kingdoms of the world and the 
glory of them." And they were all needing Him, 
needing this redemption of the inward life, need- 
ing this nourishing word of God, and 

" His spirit leaped within Him to be gone before Him then, 
Underneath the light He looks at, in among the throngs of 

men." 

But, how was He to win them? His Messi- 
anic work was to be spiritual, and as Messiah He 
was to work as a man works. He had settled 
those questions forever. But how was it that 
men got influence over men? What were the 
methods which the great used to win allegiance 
for themselves? The ancient empires, Assyria, 
Babylon, Persia, Egypt, His fatherland — what 
was their glory, where was it? It had vanished 
like smoke; the world had only one glory now, 
the gleaming radiance of imperial Rome. Her 



44 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

bronze eagles screamed from the borders of the 
mysterious northland to the farthest limits of the 
Nile; the word of Caesar was the glory of the 
nations which abode between the ancient river of 
Eden and the Pillars of Hercules. This was the 
world's glory, the arms of the Roman, whose red- 
handed procurators sat in every province and 
taught the people that power was life's one law, 
man's one way to mastery with his fellows. And 
should Messiah use this way ? Should He win his 
spiritual kingship as Caesar had won his empire? 
The narrative reads, " Again, the devil taketh 
Him unto an exceeding high mountain, and show- 
eth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the 
glory of them; and he said unto Him, All these 
things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and 
worship me." The old method of the prophetic 
appeal seemed so abortive; the prophets had come 
and gone and still the kingdom was yet to come. 
Had not the day of that appeal gone, may not 
the day of force have dawned? "Then saith 
Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is 
written, Thou shalt worship the Lord, thy God, 
and Him only shalt thou serve." And what is 
God? He is my Father, the Father whose life 
is love, whose law is love, whose way is love. 
Worship force! Worship God, and God is love; 
love is, love shall be my King and Lord. He 
was the Son of God, He was the brother of men, 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 45 

He was the messenger Son sent to recover the 
lost brothers. 

The three pictures in the panels of the Temp- 
tation mean this, when Jesus came to Himself, 
when He realized His Messiahship, when He tested 
the grounds of His splendid new consciousness, 
He was made sure that He was to violate the 
orthodox ideal of Messiah; while they were ex- 
pecting God's vicegerent to make Israel a world 
power, He as the Father's vicegerent was to bring 
in a spiritual kingdom, an inward state in which 
the Father was to be sovereign and the love-way 
the law. 

This is what it meant to Jesus to be Mes- 
siah, to give to other men, to his brothers the 
final truth about God, that God was His Father 
and theirs, and to help them to live in the world 
as the Father's children, free from care and full 
of love. As one has written, " If the story of the 
Temptation means anything, it means He mas- 
tered the title (Messiah) instead of it mastering 
Him. The Messianic dream had conquered all 
others; He conquered it. He was the Life; it 
was the tool of the Life — a tool which had been 
constructed for the destruction of Israel's enemy, 
but which it was His high mission to reconstruct 
and retemper into an instrument of healing and 
mercy for the nations. The idea did not make 
the Life; the Life picked up the clumsy misfit 



46 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

idea, cleaned it, reorganized it, humanized it, and 
assigned it a function to Himself and to others, 
for which by nature it was disqualified — even as 
that Life had ever regenerated the natural into 
the spiritual, caused old things to pass away, and 
made all things new." 

His great account with Himself settled, when 
next the world saw Him, Jesus was reading the 
old prophet's dream of Messiah, how when He 
came He would say, " The Spirit of the Lord is 
upon me, because He anointed me to preach 
good tidings to the poor ; He hath sent me to pro- 
claim release to the captives, and recovering of 
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are 
bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the 
Lord." And when He had finished (and it is 
significant how He stopped reading just at those 
words which made the darling thought of Israel 
"and the day of vengeance of our God") "He 
began to say unto them, To-day hath this Scrip- 
ture been fulfilled in your ears." This is the sig- 
nificant in Jesus' claim to be Messiah, while spirit- 
ualizing the thought of Messiah's work, He saved 
for Himself the old messianic thought of Messiah 
as God's vicegerent, the first-born of the Father. 
He believed His message was the final one after 
which there could be no other, that His idea of the 
messianic kingdom was the Father's uttermost 
possible revelation of religion, that His name for 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 47 

God once received, the last word had been spoken 
for faith. He knew nothing higher than Him- 
self save God; He transcended the authority of the 
past; He was more than Moses and David, than 
the law or the prophets, than the temple and the 
religious codes ; His " I say unto you " was con- 
scious of no possible revision. " No one," said He, 
" knoweth who the Father is, save the Son, and he 
to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." 
This was His own idea of Himself, He was so 
sure of the finality of His spiritual idea, of His 
function as the messenger Son that He staked 
His life upon it. The price He paid argues that 
He believed He was God's ultimate message to 
men. 

But Jesus believed Himself to be not only the 
Son of God, the brother of men, and the messen- 
ger Son sent to recover the lost brothers, He 
also believed Himself to be empowered to impart 
to men His ideal spirit of sonship. He thought 
of Himself as no mere preacher, nor model, but 
He was the Life and the life-giver. Here we 
stand at the central shrine in our cathedral. 
Everything leads up to this, the altar whose fires 
are the glory of the minster. It is the night be- 
fore He died ; eleven of His friends are His guests 
at the Passover meal. To-morrow the little circle 
would be shattered. The dogs whom fear had 
held in leash were unmuzzled and were snarling 



48 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

at the door. His friends were helpless to avert 
the impending doom. Only one thing they could 
do, only one thing He wished them to do and 
with that He would go to death well content. 
He could endure the cross, He could not endure 
that He should be forgotten. 

There were many things of which He had told 
them of which they needed to be reminded ; but He 
felt they needed His words not so much as they 
needed Himself. So " as they were eating, Jesus 
took bread, and gave to them saying, This is my 
body which is given for you, this do in remem- 
brance of me." In this critical ante-mortem mo- 
ment He not only saw Himself without stain, but 
felt in Himself the power to lift the stain from 
hearts on which the crimson lay burning. He 
thought of Himself as no mere truth-teller, but as 
a life-giver. To those who sought life, He said 
" follow me." To those who hungered for truth 
He said, " I am the truth." To those who would 
see God, He called " I am the way." And with 
the word " I am the life " He claimed to live and 
to be the dynamic by which men live. He felt 
that the man who wanted to live abundantly could 
not do without Him ; He was the bread, the water, 
the door of life, the vine from which grow all the 
branches. Through Him and through Him only 
men go to God, not only by what He says, but 
more by what He is. " No man knoweth who the 



JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 49 

Father is, save the Son, and he to whomsoever 
the Son willeth to reveal Him." 

This is the awesome fact in His idea of Him- 
self, His calm claim to indispensableness. God's 
messenger Son sent to recover the lost brothers, 
His message at last is of Himself. Chosen to 
point the way to the Father, He knows He best 
fulfills His function by pointing men to Himself. 
Having as His ideal God's kingship in the soul, 
He believes that the kingship is realized by mak- 
ing His love-way the life law. The Gospel He 
carried was a Gospel of God, but for practical pur- 
poses it becomes a Gospel of Himself. Called to 
tell men of the Father, He knows it enough to 
show men Himself. 

This is Jesus' idea of Himself, He was the Son 
of God, He was the brother of men, He was the 
Father's messenger Son sent to recover the lost 
brothers, He was empowered to impart to the 
brothers His perfect spirit of perfect sonship. 
Questions of philosophy are beside the mark, 
bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, something 
in us votes with Thomas when he kneels and says, 
" My Lord and my God." 



/? 



Ill 

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 



" I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. 
Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear 
fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can 
ye except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the 
branches/' 

" He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he 
do also ; and greater works than these shall he do ; because 
I go unto the Father." 

" Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father 
is perfect." 

"How think ye? If any man have a hundred sheep, and 
one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety 
and nine, and go unto the mountains, and seek that which 
goeth astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say 
unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over the ninety 
and nine which have not gone astray. Even so it is not 
the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these 
little ones should perish." 

" He that believeth hath eternal life." 

" Follow me." 



Ill 

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 

Jesus left no system of theology ; He left Him- 
self as the final idea of God. So also, Jesus left 
no system of philosophy; He left Himself as the 
final idea of man. When His disciples wanted to 
know about the Father, Jesus gave them no defi- 
nition, He gave them a living picture, said He, 
" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
When a young patrician wanted to know about 
life, Jesus gave him no theory, He gave Him a 
living picture, said He, " Follow me." Would 
you know what God is you have to know only 
what Jesus is. Would you know Jesus' idea of 
man, you have to know only Jesus idea of Him- 
self. 

We have seen how Jesus believed Himself to 
be the Son of God. He was conscious of a un- 
ique filial relationship with God. He knew His 
sonship was more than other men's, as the in- 
ventor is more than the apprentice; He knew by 
instinct what others had to learn by instruction; 
He was the Son, others were becoming Sons. He 

S3 



54 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

knew His sonship was more than other men's, as 
the perfect is more than the imperfect; all but He 
needed the summons, " ye therefore shall be per- 
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect " ; He was 
adult, others were adolescent. But He knew 
Himself to be the brother of men; His sonship 
was not of another kind than men's, it was only 
more than men's; there was a difference, but. it 
was not in the nature, it was in the growth. He 
was " the firstborn among many brethren." 

Jesus called Himself the light of the world; 
but He said to men, " ye are the light of the 
world." He said, " he that receiveth me receiveth 
Him that sent me " ; but He told men, " He that 
receiveth you receiveth me." He claimed to do 
divine works ; but He prophesied of men, " the 
works that I do shall ye do also, and greater 
works than these shall ye do." He believed in a 
divine descent for Himself; but He believed 
the same for His disciples, " They are not 
of this world even as I am not of this 
world." He said " the Father and I are one " ; 
but He understood that this oneness is possible be- 
tween men and God, for He prayed, " that they 
may be one even as we are." His sonship might 
be more than other men's by His perfect knowl- 
edge of the Father, and His perfect likeness to the 
Father, but in principle His sonship is homoge- 
neous with man's. " I am the vine," said He, 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 55 

"ye are the branches; abide in me, and I in you/' 
You in me, I in you, one in each other; there ap- 
pears to be no dividing line; it is a single bundle 
of life; human or divine, either or both. Hu- 
manity opens at its topmost to take in Jesus; di- 
vinity opens at its lowest to take in man. 

" Draw if thou canst the mystic line 
Severing rightly His from thine, 
Which is human, which divine." 

Some day you go down to the shore. Your 
dingy lies in a wee reed-fringed inlet of one of 
the many bays that indent the coast of Long Is- 
land. You get into your boat and shove off the 
yellow sand. You drop your oars in and then 
pull away, away down the winding inlet, from 
behind the fringe of reeds, across the little bar, 
over the rocking waves of the bay, out into the 
deep, green, long, low swell of the limitless ocean. 
From the inlet into the ocean! And where did 
the inlet end, and where did the ocean begin? 
And what is the difference between the water of 
the inlet and the water of the ocean? The same 
elements combine in both; the same winds that 
blow in from the distances sweep over the sur- 
faces of both; the same tides which roll in from 
the middle seas swell the waves of both. The 
difference is shallow and unplumbed, land-locked 
and unlimited. But the likeness is more than the 



56 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

difference, the likeness of water, wind and tides 
which bring the ocean into the reed-fringed inlet, 
and carry you out of the inlet upon the bosom of 
the shoreless flood. Man and Jesus, the inlet and 
the ocean; the divine nature becomes human in 
Jesus, the human nature becomes divine in Jesus. 
God has his human life and unveils it in Jesus; 
man has his divine life and it is unveiled in Jesus. 
You come immediately upon this idea of the 
divinity of man when you hear Jesus teaching the 
disciples to pray saying " Our Father who art in 
heaven." There are certain scenes which quicken 
the imagination. Abraham, his back upon the an- 
cient ancestral home, his camels bearing him and 
his childless wife across the desert to an unknown 
land, his eyes fastened upon the star-lit sky, 
dreaming of himself as the patriarch of a new 
people, like those stars innumerable and like them 
separate from the world of men. Columbus, 
standing bare-browed upon the deck of his little 
caravel, with Spain a thousand leagues behind 
across the desolate Atlantic, and gazing at a thin 
blue line broadening above the western horizon 
to become at last a new world full of life and 
liberty and happiness for the old. Luther, the 
rustic monk, in the hall of the bishop's palace at 
Worms, face to face with his sovereign, the pope's 
legate and a dazzling throng of august dignitaries, 
responding as they adjure him to recant his new 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 57 

religion, " Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, 
God help me ; Amen/' Such scenes, because they 
mark crises in the life of the race inflame the im- 
agination. 

But that sight of Jesus and the fishermen pray- 
ing together transcends these and all other scenes 
in awesomeness and immensity of issue. Here 
we watch the discovery of a new people, a new 
world, a new religion. A new people which shall 
care to claim no forbear but God; a new world 
which shall know no alien nor citizen, but only man 
the brother of Christ; a new religion which shall 
know no elect nor reprobate, but only man the 
dear child of the Father who is in heaven. 

Jesus is alone with His disciples. There are 
Peter and Andrew his brother; they are rude, 
unlearned Galilean fishermen. There are John 
and James, both sons of Zebedee, the prosperous 
ship-owner of Bethsaida. There is Matthew, the 
citizen of populous Capernaum, one-time revenue 
officer in the service of the accursed Roman. 
There is Simon, the political mal-content, the 
fanatic nationalist, the hater of publicans like 
Matthew. There is Philip, a man whose motto 
in life seems to be " seeing is believing." There 
are Bartholemew the mystic, Judas the bigot, 
Thomas the skeptic, and Thaddeus and the other 
James. The gamut of human kind, character and 
condition is here, the race in miniature. The rich 



58 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

man is here and the poor, the learned and the un- 
lettered, the good and the evil. They stand with 
bowed heads praying; Jesus leads, they follow, 
" Our Father who art in heaven." Our Father, 
Jesus' and John's, Peter's and Matthew's, Bar- 
tholomew's and Judas'; the Father of the rich 
man and the poor, the Father of the learned and 
the unlettered, the Father of the good and the 
evil. All are brothers in one family; differences 
of culture, condition, capacity and character are 
like the differences in their varied colored dress, 
important for other relationships, but for this re- 
lationship mere accidents. 

Beneath the dress breathes the soul, that human 
life which is born " not of blood, nor of the will 
of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," 
and this soul knits the twelve and Him into one 
common brotherhood. Evidently if He is a Son 
of God they, too, are sons ; obviously if His origin 
makes Him divine, they have the same origin and 
must be divine. For that is the meaning of Fa- 
therhood and sonship. For a human to call God 
" Father " what is that but to humanize God ; for 
a man to claim deity as his forbear what is that 
but to divinize man? A father and his children 
are shareholders in the same stock; if the father's 
shares are divine, the children's must be, no mat- 
ter what may be their holdings; were the chil- 
dren's shares human, the father's are the same, 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 59 

though his holdings are infinite. Once grant 
Fatherhood, and there can be only one conclusion, 
" now are we children of God," and we must be 
" like Him," as St. John puts it. The Lord's 
Prayer raises humanity to the eternal peerage. 
And nowhere did Jesus intimate that there was any 
man excepted from this high birthright. 

The parable of the prodigal son puts the case 
explicitly. That story was told just to prove that 
a sinner never ceases to be a son, that the Son of 
God is warranted in being friends with publicans 
because that sort of folk can say as well as He, 
" Father." " Both the Pharisees and scribes mur- 
mured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and 
eateth with them. And He spake unto them this 
parable, saying, A certain man had two sons," and 
the younger wearying of the home restraints went 
far away, and squandered his patrimony in riotous 
living. One morning he awoke to find himself 
stripped and outcast, something the world had no 
use for, except to make a swineherd. Then in the 
fresh light of this new experience, there surged 
again the far-ebbed memory of his home and his 
childhood, and this inward tide swept back his 
penitent heart within hearing of the father's voice 
and a revelation of the father's love, by which 
love he was reborn and reinstated. And this is 
how Jesus described the moment when the tide 
turned, " he came to himself." Up to that mo- 



60 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

ment the boy had been beside himself, but when 
he came back to himself, he found that inward 
self crying " father/' And Jesus went on to say 
that the father saw the boy while he was yet a 
great way off, and that he ran and fell upon his 
neck and kissed him; kissed this soiled, shrunken, 
shame-faced man, and said " my son." 

And the way Jesus told that parable gives us the 
right to infer that no human being can ever lose 
the right to say " Father/' that all men every- 
where, no matter how far gone, are God's sons. 
Appearances may be against it; but Jesus talked 
as if it were self-evident; it was self-evident to 
Him, because He knew " what was in man." He 
knew " we are sons/' as one apostle put it, " par- 
takers of the divine nature/' as another expressed 
it. " The Image of the invisible God," as St. 
Paul called Jesus, knew that men are " the image 
and glory of God," as the same apostle wrote. 

With this idea of man's divine descent, Jesus 
appraised life as of incalculable value. No word 
is oftener on His lips than " life." But one feels 
that He is embarrassed by the word, that He 
means more by it than men mean. For Him the 
word does not stand for vitality, existence. Life 
is more than meat; it cannot subsist on bread; it 
consisteth not of abundance of things ; no thing is 
its equivalent ; " what shall a man be profited, 
if he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 6 1 

life? or what shall a man give in exchange for 
his life? " To leave no doubt in men's mind that 
life is not this squalid thing they think of when 
they talk about life, Jesus had another word which 
He was accustomed to use with it; He talked of 
" eternal life," meaning not mere everlasting life, 
life that lasts beyond time, but life that has the 
quality of eternity, the timeless quality, the divine 
quality; the eternal life is the kind of life God 
has ; God is its source and nourishment. And this 
eternal life He claimed for Himself and said men 
shared with Him and God; only they needed it 
" more abundantly." So one soul had infinite 
worth to the Father; He could not afford to lose 
one life, no matter how small, how far fore- 
wandered ; " See," said He, " that ye despise not 
one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in 
heaven their angels do always behold the face of 
my Father who is in heaven." 

Rich as the shepherd is with his safe folded 
ninety and nine, he must seek the solitary lamb 
which has strayed away. Wealthy as the woman 
is with her nine coins, she cannot afford to lose 
one, but must sweep the house and do her utmost 
to recover the one that rolled away and was lost. 
Maybe the father has another boy at home, and a 
house full of servants, but if there is one away, he 
must watch and wait and keep scanning the hori- 
zon for a sight of him coming back, and then 



62 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

when this one has returned there is the banquet 
for which the calf has been fatted. Nothing lets 
you into Jesus' value judgment of life like that 
saying that at first sight looks so unfair, " There 
shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that re- 
penteth, more than over ninety and nine righteous 
persons, who need no repentance;" that is because 
from His way of looking at God and man, the 
man has no equivalent, he is of infinite worth. 

But along with His appreciation of man's in- 
trinsic value, his essential sonship, his infinite 
worth, Jesus combines a sane estimate of man's 
actual condition. Men are God's children, but 
they are " evil " children ; all of them must pray, 
" forgive us our debts," and in all of them lurk 
" evil thoughts " and sensual inclinations which 
defile. Jesus believes Himself to be the messen- 
ger Son sent to the brothers, because the brothers 
are " lost " ; they are lost like sheep that have heard 
the call of the wild; they are lost like a coin that 
has dropped out of circulation and so ceased of 
its true purpose; they are lost like a boy who 
has gone away, ignoring his Father's rights to 
his service and affection. And so, according to 
Jesus, man's sonship is a fact, but it is also a 
task ; man is not only a son, but he has to become 
a son; and even when he comes to himself and 
says " Father," realizes his sonship, he is " yet 
afar off." But (and this is the impressive thing 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 63 

in Jesus' appraisement of human nature) He be- 
lieved that man is able for the task. 

Jesus dared to believe that man could incarnate 
the moral values which He Himself realized; they 
could be sons, perfect as their heavenly Father is 
perfect. As a recent writer says, " If there was 
anything new in the thought of Jesus it was this." 
Jesus believed in man, in man's essential affinity 
with God, in man's ability to repeat His life. If 
He did not, then one must despair of His sanity, 
if not His honesty. Only on the belief that He 
believed Himself imitable can we explain His treat- 
ment of the woman of Samaria and Mary of Mag- 
dala, Simon Peter and Zacchaeus. Only on the 
belief that He had unqualified faith in humanity's 
unbounded possibilities can the Beatitudes and the 
" new commandment " be saved from the charge 
of insincerity. Only on the belief that He meant 
it literally when he said, " follow me," can we con- 
tinue to trust Him as the one who " did no sin, 
neither was guile found in His mouth." " Follow 
me," He said to fishmongers and aristocrats, to 
publicans and skeptics, nay, it was the word He 
had for every man ; " if any man would come 
after me, let him deny himself and take up his 
cross and follow me " ; and that word had only one 
meaning, " where I am there shall also my servant 
be." This fishmonger, this aristocrat, this pub- 
lican, this skeptic, any man who can follow an- 



64 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

other must have the same capacity in him. A 
fish cannot follow a bird; a bird cannot follow a 
man; only like can follow like. If Jesus is per- 
fect, then His " follow me." means that any man 
can be perfect; it is the same as saying, you can 
be what I am, you can do what I do, you were 
made for this, you are most yourself when you 
are most like me. 

In one of his essays, Emerson has a striking 
passage in which he calls attention to the way in 
which the machinery of society adapts itself auto- 
matically to the failures of human nature. A man 
in the heat of passion strikes off a crime, a thing 
which in his youth he would have shuddered at 
the thought of. But once guilty, and though 
guilty for the first time, society is ready for him, 
the criminal; there are the police, the courtroom, 
the judges, the prisoner's dock, the sentence, the 
jail; they all deal with his case just as though 
they had been expecting this man to do this par- 
ticular crime. It is a sad commentary upon the 
way in which we think of human nature. We 
expect the break, we look for the crash, we take 
it for granted that the fall will come, we believe 
that the fall is the natural thing, the thing this 
man was made for. We feel that the worst we 
do is the natural thing for us to do, the best is out 
of our line. We must go on at this low level, 
leaping upward once in a while in some uncom- 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 65 

mon act of purity or love, leaping upward like 
some single wave tossed above sea level by the 
churning of some vessel's screw, but falling back 
again into the same old, dark, cold surge. The 
upward leap is an accident, the bitter level is the 
real thing. 

But the very opposite of all this is the belief 
of Jesus. He is not surprised at man's best 
moments ; He expects the act of purity or love ; He 
counts the best the thing we were made for, 
the worst the unnatural thing; He looks for man 
to be not the thing He has been, but the better he 
can be; He says " be perfect," and He knows it is 
possible. Man is God's son, without Jesus God's 
lost son, but withal able to come to himself and to 
say, " I can do all things in Christ which strength- 
ened me." That is Jesus' idea of man. 

He that hath seen Jesus hath seen the Father; 
he that hath seen Jesus hath seen himself. The 
first essential element in the religion of Jesus is 
the humanity of God, and the second is like unto 
it, and it is this the divinity of man. Two rivers 
that rise thousands of miles apart and drain the 
watershed of a nation, meet and mingle in the 
Mississippi. From the west the Missouri comes. 
Far up in the Rockies' virgin snows and amid the 
Paradise-like beauties of the Yellowstone Park it 
is born. For three thousand miles it flows 
through mountain and prairie, an unconfined, 



66 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

fresh and refreshing stream, to blend itself at last 
with the Mississippi, and with it find the parent 
sea. From the east the Ohio comes. At the foot 
of a sooty city it rises; for nine hundred miles it 
drags its way through a score of cities, each of 
which pours its decay into its already overbur- 
dened waters. At last, weary of its weight of sedi- 
ment, the Ohio empties its waters into the Mis- 
sissippi, to find therein another destiny. Thus the 
river from the west fulfills itself, and the river 
from the east rediscovers itself in the one central 
flood, whose waters are the source of an inex- 
haustible fertility and bear great ships which de- 
termine the destinies of peoples. 

Two rivers that rise on opposite sides of hu- 
man experience drain the race's feeling about 
religion. From the one side, rising in the fresh, 
simple beginnings of human life, flows the stream 
of faith, the sure feeling that God is and that He 
is the source and satisfaction of life, From the 
other side of experience, from our wretched fail- 
ures and our moral defeats, flows the stream of 
fact, the fact of depravity and utter hopelessness. 
The stream of faith refreshes and sweetens life; 
but the stream of fact has the stain of evil in it, 
and the poison of despair; and both of these rivers 
unite in one imperial Manhood, whose life is the 
race's living water, and whose Spirit holds the 
secret of humanity's destiny. In Jesus Christ 



JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 6j 

human nature's faith in God and human nature's 
fact of despair conflow. In Him the age-long 
feeling after God is taken up, verified, enriched, 
and at last united with its eternal source. In 
Him the fact of human nature's despair is taken 
up, dissolved, and then rediscovered by the 
counter-fact of human nature's divinity. In the 
mighty flood of Jesus' teaching, and His life, man 
finds his God a Father of boundless, gratuitous, 
ungrudging love, and finds himself a son destined 
to be like his Father, when he shall see Him even 
as He is. 



IV 

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 



" Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap ; 
which have no store-chamber nor barn; and God feedeth 
them : of how much more value are ye than the birds ! And 
which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the 
measure of his life? If then ye are not able to do even that 
which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest? 
Consider the lilies, how they grow : they toil not, neither 
do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even Solomon in all 
his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God 
doth so clothe the grass in the field, which to-day is, and 
to-morrow is cast into the oven; how much more shall He 
clothe you, O ye of little faith? And seek not ye what ye 
shall eat, and what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful 
mind. For all these things do the nations of the world seek 
after; but your Father knoweth that ye have need of these 
things. Yet seek ye His kingdom, and these things shall 
be added unto you. Fear not, little flock; for it is your 
Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." 

" Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should 
depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His 
own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end. 
And Jesus, knowing that the Father had" given all things 
into His hands, and that He came forth from God and 
goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside His 
garments; and He took a towel, and girded Himself. Then 
He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the 
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith 
He was girded. So when He had washed their feet, and 
taken His garments, and sat down again, He said unto 
them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me, 
Teacher, and, Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I 
then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, 
ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have 
given you an example, that ye also should do as I have done 
to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is not 
greater than his lord; neither one that is sent greater than 
he that hath sent him.' , 



IV 

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 

Religion no longer is called an invention; it is 
classed with the elemental instincts. 

" As the hart panteth after the water brooks, 
So panteth my soul after Thee, O God," 

is not only sublime poetry, but exact science. 
And religion is allowed to be not only a primary 
but a universal instinct. History proves that " all 
men yearn after the gods " ; " humanity is incur- 
ably religious," as a great Frenchman expresses it. 
One defines religion at his own risk. In this it 
is a case of " many men, many minds." But this 
may be said to be the common denominator of all 
the definitions, religion is a conscious relation to 
God. To know a man's religion you have to 
know only the man's idea of his relation to God. 
To know Jesus' religion you have to know only 
Jesus' idea of God as " our Father." But for 
practical operation every relationship is at once a 
feeling and an action. A relationship is worth as 
much as the feelings it evokes, and the actions 
which these feelings impel. A relationship which 

71 



J2 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

made one neither hot nor cold, which never made 
him say " yes " or " no," or move hand or foot 
is not worth while. To be real and vital a rela- 
tionship must quicken love or hate, trust or fear, 
must set a-going speech or silence, conduct and 
character. What practical difference did the idea 
of God's Fatherhood make in Jesus' inward and 
outward life; how did it make Him feel, what 
did it make Him do? When we answer those 
questions we get Jesus' idea of religion. 

The night before Jesus died will be cherished 
always for two equally beautiful and tender inci- 
dents which occurred therein. The one was the 
Last Supper, the other was the washing of the 
disciples' feet. Of the two disciples who were 
with Him that night and kept a record of what 
He did, St. Matthew saved the picture of the 
Christ bending forward with the platter and the 
cup; and St. John chose the picture of the Christ 
bending down with the basin and the towel. 
Either picture is characteristic of the Master. All 
His life He was bending over other men's empti- 
ness and pain. So either the Christ bending for- 
ward with the broken bread, saying, " take, eat," or 
the Christ bending over the travel-pinched feet of 
the disciples, show Him as He was and loved to be. 
St. John's picture is especially interesting be- 
cause he wrote his gospel with the confessed pur- 
pose of proving that Jesus is the Son of God, 



JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 73 

and in this incident the apostle shows us how this 
filial sense makes Jesus feel and what it makes 
Him do. He begins the story with these striking 
words, " Jesus, knowing that the Father had given 
all things into His hands, and that He came forth 
from God, and goeth unto God;" in other words, 
the Father-Son relationship was the cause of what 
followed. It was this conscious sonship which 
bent Jesus down till He knelt at the feet of men, 
who, in the fitness of things, ought to have been 
kneeling before Him and washing His feet with 
their tears. We have said that a man's religion 
is the feelings and then the acts which result from 
the relationship between himself and God as he 
knows Him. What, then, was the feeling of this 
Man who knew that God was His Father, that 
He came forth from God and was going unto 
God? 

It is Good Friday eve. He and eleven of His 
friends are gathered in another friend's guest-room 
for a last tryst. He had left them a keepsake, 
something to remember Him by. The hour is 
late. Already by the light of their fitful torches 
the whips have gathered their pack for the ugly 
deed in the Garden of Gethsemene. He knows 
this ; He knew " that His hour was come that He 
should depart out of this world unto the Father." 
He has watched the dark shadow creeping always 
nearer, now He can feel its chill sweep His cheek. 



74 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

He has come to the moment when conscience 
searches the heart of the average man with fingers 
tipped with fire. He is a very young man, with 
all a young man's love of living; but He has to 
give it up. He had set His heart upon one thing, 
and that one thing seemed to human vision to be 
a will-o'-the-wisp. 

And what is He doing? Bathing the feet of a 
few fishermen. What ineffable calmness! What 
unbroken serenity! Unconscious of any need in 
Himself, He seems conscious only of the need of 
the friends He is to leave so soon. With no 
feeling of personal indebtedness to God or man, 
He is concerned only to make His comrades feel 
that He knew about their debt and was going to 
help them make up their deficit. With the su- 
preme court ready to vote Him a failure and give 
Him a felon's death, He knew Himself bound to 
succeed, and reckoned His death to be the birth- 
pangs of a new humanity. He knows no inward 
unrest; He feels Himself living a kind of life on 
which death has no lien; let death come, when or 
how, the Father's hand will be on everything in it, 
as it has been on everything in life. The world 
rests in the Father ; it is His house ; and He is the 
Father's Son; and the Father cares, why should 
He ? "I go unto the Father. Peace I leave with 
you ; my peace I give unto you : not as the world 



JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION J$ 

giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be 
troubled, neither let it be fearful." 

Such quiet, such peace, the world has seen 
nothing just like it. He is in the world as a child 
in a Father's house, free from care, full of trust. 
And that night is all of a piece with the way He 
had always lived. He never worried, never 
fretted, never feared the future or any change. 
Long ago He had told the disciples, " Consider 
the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap ; which 
have no store-chamber nor barn ; and God f eedeth 
them : of how much more value are ye than the 
birds! And which of you by being anxious can 
add a cubit unto the measure of his life? If then 
ye are not able to do even that which is least, why 
are ye anxious concerning the rest ? Consider the 
lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, 
neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one 
of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass in 
the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast 
into the oven ; how much more shall He clothe you, 
O ye of little faith?" 

Here meets us one of the surprising traits of the 
gospel. Jesus seems so merciful toward sins that 
we excoriate. He makes friends with a penitent 
adulteress; He can hardly abandon the treacher- 
ous Judas. But there are two sins He paints jet 



76 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

black; the first is the sin of conceit; the second is 
the sin of anxiety. Not the adulteress nor the be- 
trayer seems so hopelessly far gone as the man 
who knows it all and the man who lives as if God 
were dead. He talks about worry as if it were 
a person, a soldier in armor, a tyrant, nay, as if it 
were Satan himself, something to be fought to the 
finish. When a man sets his heart upon a mere 
thing, something to eat, or wear or live in, when 
he trembles at the thought of losing it, when he 
kills himself to keep it, Jesus says that man is a 
heathen, " for after all these things do the Gen- 
tiles seek," these alien races who know not God. 
To fret about a dinner, or a bit of lace or fur- 
nishing is an outrage against God ; God, who dines 
the raven, weaves the gossamer for the lilies and 
shelters the sparrow of the street. 

Care is a denial of God; it is blank atheism. 
From Jesus' point of view the opposite of faith is 
not skepticism, which is doubt of the prevailing 
orthodoxy; but faith's antinomy is fear of the 
future, fret about the vicissitudes of living. 
" Why are ye fearful ? " He called to the despairing 
disciples, as they anticipated shipwreck on the Sea 
of Galilee, " Have ye not yet faith? " " O ye of 
little faith, why reason ye among yourselves?" 
said He one day, when He found them fretting 
over an empty bread-basket. Faith to Jesus meant 
the quiet assurance that a man rests for now and 



JESUS' JDEA OF RELIGION -tf 

forever in the hollow of the Father's hand. So 
He talked and so He died. The dying was all 
new to Him, but it was the Father's will; the Fa- 
ther was here as He had been in every circum- 
stance of His career, and so " Father, into Thy 
hands I commend my spirit." 

We marvel at His tranquillity, His steadfast- 
ness, His unruffled acceptance of the world's hot 
and cold, sweet and bitter, smooth and rough. 
He knew " that He came forth from God and was 
going unto God," the world was but the Father's 
house, and He a child in it, a child free from care, 
a child full of trust. This was the feeling Jesus 
got from His idea of God's Fatherhood. 

And now what were the actions of this Man, who 
knew that He came forth from God and was go- 
ing to God, what did this filial relationship make 
Him do? "Jesus, knowing that the Father had 
given all things into His hands, and that He came 
forth from God and goeth unto God, riseth from 
supper, and layeth aside His garments; and He 
took a towel and girded Himself. Then He pour- 
eth water into the basin and began to wash the 
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel 
wherewith He was girded." Did they know what 
He had done unto them? They called Him 
Teacher, and, Lord ; and He was ; and the Teacher 
and Lord was washing their feet. They could 
never forget that; service was the crown and 



yS THE MIND OF CHRIST 

glory of sonship; the way to get up was to get 
down ; one must stoop to conquer ; belief in God's 
Fatherhood involved belief in man's brotherhood. 
Nothing that He could have said about it could 
have cut that truth so deep in their hearts as the 
feeling of the Lord's hands on their feet. They 
must live in the world as children in a Father's 
house; but they must remember that the Father's 
house is full of children. That was the one truth 
He had set most store by. 

Fresh from His self-discovery as the Father's 
messenger Son sent to the lost children, He began 
His search with the promise of good news for the 
poor, release for the captives, recovering of sight 
for the blind, and liberty for them that are bruised. 
And how well He fulfilled His promise is shown 
by the fact that He got the nickname of the 
" friend of publicans and sinners." In the Ser- 
mon on the Mount He defined the perfect life as 
loving one's enemies and praying for those who 
persecute, and He kept pace with that ideal down 
to the end. One once asked Him the way to the 
perfect life, and He gave two rules, love of God, 
and love of neighbor as one's self, and then He 
told the story of the Good Samaritan to make it 
clear that the second rule was as important as the 
first. And everybody knows that the Good Sa- 
maritan is only another name for Jesus. 

It gives one pause to see how little Jesus says 



JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 79 

about loving God. He does indeed say that the 
first commandment is " Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." 
But apart from this there is no recorded discourse 
upon the theme of love to God, and there is not 
one parable to illustrate it. When He talks about 
love it seems that it is love toward men He thinks 
most about, desires most to produce. Of the 
Beatitudes, two concern our attitude toward God, 
humility and pureness of heart; one concerns our 
attitude toward Himself, when we are reviled for 
His sake ; but five concern our attitude toward our 
fellow men. Love toward God expressed in a 
temple offering is not to be thought of until a 
man is on loving terms with his neighbor, " If 
therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, 
and there rememberest that thy brother hath 
aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the 
altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy 
brother, and then come and offer thy gift." 

The redeeming power of charity, He teaches in 
the parable of the unjust steward; inhumanity is 
the unpardonable sin is the lesson of the story of 
Dives and Lazarus; and the parables of the lost 
sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy, spoken in de- 
fence of His own great love for the sinners, 
prove that love is of God, for God is love. The 
proof of friendship with Jesus is love one to an- 



80 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

other. Indeed, if one loves his fellows Jesus ac- 
cepts it as an equivalent for the love of Himself. 
So He taught in the parable of the last judg- 
ment He said at that great assize men would 
be divided as when a shepherd puts his sheep on 
one side and his goats on another. Some would 
have this said to them, " Come, ye blessed of my 
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from 
the foundation of the world ;" others would hear 
the awful words, " Depart from me, ye cursed, 
into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil 
and his angels." And the reason for this separa- 
tion is a remarkable one; the question asked is 
not, Did you love God? but, Did you love me? 
Those represented as entering into eternal felicity 
are told that they are so favored because they gave 
Jesus food when He was hungry, drink when He 
was thirsty, clothes when He was naked, they 
healed Him when He was sick, visited Him when 
He was in prison. The righteous astonished to 
hear this, tell Jesus that they had never seen Him, 
never heard of Him, to which He responds, "No, 
you may not have seen me personally, may not 
have heard of me, but in doing these things for 
the little ones, the weak ones, the obscure men 
and women, you were really doing them for me." 
Those who are represented as shut out from God's 
presence are told that they are condemned because 
they never fed Jesus, never gave Him to drink, 



JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 8 1 

never clothed Him, healed Him, visited Him in 
prison. To which these reply that these are the 
very things they did do for Jesus Himself. 
" Nay," the Christ answers, " to me personally 
you may have showed mercy, but inasmuch as ye 
did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not 
unto me." The obvious lesson of this parable is 
that Jesus set more store by loving others than by 
loving Him, that pure religion is for practical 
purposes the daily exercise of neighborly love and 
pity. 

One may object that such a view makes religion 
just mere morality, a thing which can do without 
God; that Buddhism can produce it, or Islam or 
Confucianism. The answer to this contention is 
that for centuries these religions have had wor- 
shippers, but they have failed to generate this love- 
spirit. When the Chinese Commissioners visited 
Chicago they were shown its railways, its ware- 
houses, its factories, its hospitals, Hull House and 
the Young Men's Christian Association. " What 
impressed you most ? "someone asked these Con- 
fucianists. "The hospitals, Hull House and the 
Young Men's Christian Association," was the an- 
swer. Railways, factories and warehouses were 
common things in China; they were not so large 
nor so many as those in Chicago, to be sure; but 
these things China did not have, hospitals where 
sick folks were healed without pay, Hull House 



82 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

where the overborne were befriended for love's 
sake, the Young Men's Christian Association 
where young men of culture and social standing 
gave their time and strength to be big brothers 
to fellows who were lonely and forlorn. These 
things Confucianism had not given China; these 
things Jesus' idea of God's fatherhood had given 
Chicago; these things were only where the son- 
ship which informed the soul of Jesus informed 
the souls of men who were called by His adorable 
name. And so Jesus' kind of love and pity cannot 
do without God, it grows out of the idea that God 
is our Father; but " the love of one's neighbor is 
the only practical proof on earth of that love of 
God which is strong in humility." 

Believing that so strongly, one does not wonder 
that Jesus should have spent His last evening with 
the disciples in making them feel that He counted 
service the one thing worth while. He had many 
things to say unto them, many truths of God and 
destiny which He might unveil before their vision, 
many riddles of existence which he might have 
solved while they waited ; but there was little time 
for talk; there was time for one act; words might 
be forgotten, such an act would live while memory 
hung together. Very deliberately He rose from 
the table, folded up the seamless cloak, girded Him- 
self with the towel, filled a basin with water, and 
before any one realized what He was doing He was 



JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 83 

down on His knees bathing their feet. Then 
there was a brief prayer in the same theme, the 
Jesus theme as musicians might say, the theme of 
brotherly service, and He opened the door and 
went out to write the same theme in His own 
blood and hang it on a cross. 

Jesus lived in the world as in a Father's house; 
but He remembered that the house was full of 
children. The sense of His Father as our Father 
made Him not only the trustful child, but also the 
loving brother. The feeling His idea of God bred 
in Him was childlike trust; the acts His idea of 
God brought out were deeds of brotherly love. 
To trust God as the Father who is doing and will 
do the best for one, to do the best for men as the 
children of the Father that is Jesus' idea of re- 
ligion. To believe that God is one's Father and 
to live in the world as in the Father's house, that 
is free from care, to believe that God is the Fa- 
ther of all men and to live in the world as in the 
Father's house full of children, that is full of love, 
that is the religion of Jesus. 



V 
JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 



" I have found my sheep which was lost." 
" I have found the piece which I had lost." 

"This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, 
and is found." 

"The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which 
was lost" 



V 
JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 

In his studies of the " Varieties of Religious 
Experience," Prof. William James says, " There 
is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions 
all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: — 
first, an uneasiness ; and second, its solution. The 
uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a 
sense that there is something wrong about us as 
we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that 
we are saved from the wrongness by making 
proper connection with the higher powers." 
There is a universal feeling that there is something 
wrong with us; so then a real religion must take 
account of this wrongness ; and since it is the men 
who are most right who most feel the wrongness, 
we may expect that the matter will bulk large in 
the teaching of Jesus. 

Jesus does not talk much about life's wrong- 
ness in the abstract. His practise is that of the 
physician, diagnosis and cure. But when He does 
stop in the midst of His practise to talk about it, 
He has one name for this wrongness; He calls it 

87 



88 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

being " lost/' " The Son of Man is come to 
seek and to save that which was lost," He says. 
And when the ethical aristocrats of His day com- 
plained about His friendship with the " sinners/' 
He described these " sinners " as " lost " things, 
telling three stories, one of a lost sheep, another 
of a lost coin, a third of a lost boy. If we want 
to find out what is wrong with life, what was 
Jesus' idea of sin, we have to understand what He 
meant by being " lost." The more we study the 
fifteenth chapter of what somebody calls " the 
most beautiful book in the world," in which Jesus 
gives His definition of being lost, the clearer we 
see that the three parables are not three separate 
stories, but three little chapters of one story of 
the soul of man. They are related like the three 
primary colors which mingle in white light. The 
story of the lost sheep is like the red, the story of 
the lost coin like the blue, and the story of the lost 
boy most luminous, nearest the white truth, is the 
yellow. The three stories read together, red, 
blue and yellow, throw the white light on the great 
fact of sin. 

A shepherd had a flock of an hundred sheep; 
one wandered away; and the shepherd left the 
ninety and nine in the fold and went hunting for 
the one that was lost. And when he had found 
it, he laid it across his shoulders and trudging 
home called to his friends, " Rejoice with me, for 



JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 89 

I have found my sheep which was lost." A 
woman had ten pieces of money; she lost one; 
forthwith she lighted a lamp, swept the house, 
took no rest until the coin lay once again in her 
hand, and then she had a celebration with her 
friends, because, as she put it, " I have found the 
piece; which I had lost." A man had two sons. 
One day the younger of them said to his father, 
" Father, give me the portion of thy substance 
that falleth to me," and getting it, he went far 
away from home and squandered his fortune in 
folly. At last, stripped and starving, he was 
compelled to hire out as a swineherd. So situ- 
ated, the boy came to his senses, and memory con- 
jured up the picture of the old home, with its 
abundance even for the servants. And he re- 
solved to go back home, fling himself upon his 
father's pity, and beg just for a servant's berth. 
And all the time of his absence his father must 
have been scanning the horizon for a sight of the 
boy, for one day, after the son started home, the 
father spied him afar off, and he ran and fell on 
his neck and kissed him, and before the prodigal 
could get to the point of asking to be hired as a 
servant, the servants at the father's bidding were 
serving him, doing everything to make the boy 
feel that he belonged in the home as a son and 
nothing less. And they had a banquet that night, 
and great joy, and this was the reason the father 



90 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

gave for it, " for this, my son was dead, and is 
alive again; he was lost, and is found." 

There can be no question as to the meaning 
Jesus meant to convey by these parables. Each 
one of them moves between two poles, human life 
as it is, and human life as it ought to be. Human 
life as it is is the sheep in the wilderness, the coin 
in the corner, the boy in the pig-stye. And hu- 
man life as it ought to be is the sheep restored to 
the fold, the coin in the housewife's hand, the boy 
enriched with his father's favor. " Lost " is the 
word that describes life as it is ; " found " is the 
word that describes life as it ought to be. 

What is a lost thing? We never call the big- 
horn sheep of the Rockies lost sheep, because they 
are wild sheep, and the mountains are the place 
where wild sheep belong. But if one lamb strays 
away from the ranch and up into the fastnesses 
of the mountains, we call him a lost sheep, because 
he has heard and obeyed the call of the wild, has 
gone back to the lower life of the wilderness. We 
never speak of the gold and silver in the quartz 
of Alaska as lost money, because it is not money, 
but just raw metal which no one has used. But 
if you should lose your purse full of gold or silver, 
you would advertise for the money you had lost; 
lost, because it is stamped metal made to be a 
medium of exchange, and now fallen out of use. 
Among the gang of street gamins who gathered 



JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 9 1 

around the great newspaper houses about mid- 
night last night there were a lot of little chaps 
whom no one ever thinks of as lost boys, because 
they have no home, no other relations than their 
ragged comrades. But if in some way your little 
boy had been among them last night, the police 
would have taken notice of a lost boy; lost, be- 
cause he was away from his relations. And so a 
lost thing is a thing which has become wild, 
dropped out of use, got out of its natural relations. 
And Jesus says men are lost, living in their lower 
life, not fulfilling their true purpose, self-assertive, 
out of their true relationships. 

What has experience taught us about human 
nature ? " It is an easy thing to make up one's 
mind," said Grizel. " It's easy," said Tommy, 
" to you that have just one mind, but if you had 
as many minds as I have, — " The most of us 
feel with Tommy. We have two minds, the one 
thinks one way, the other thinks the other. One 
part of us says " yes," the other part says " no." 
The good man feels coiled up in his heart the 
same springs which, unwinding, stain the crim- 
inal's hand red. The criminal has moments when 
he is impelled to do the same things which have 
become a habit in the white soul. Good and bad 
feel these same opposing compulsions in their 
bosom, watching each other. Dr. Jekyl and Mr. 
Hyde each has a first cousin living with each one 



92 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

of us. Every one has this double life, the higher 
and lower. St. Paul's words need no explanation 
for experience, " The good which I would I do 
not; but the evil which I would not, that I prac- 
tise. For I delight in the law of God after the in- 
ward man ; but I see a different law in my members, 
warring against the law of my mind, and bringing 
me into captivity under the law of sin which is in 
my members." 

And what experience knows, science certifies. 
It says that human nature is double. We have an 
animal life and another life, an outward self and 
an inward. " The brain of the chimpanzee/' says 
Dr. W. H. Thompson, " as far as structure goes, 
presents us with not only every lobe, but with 
every convolution of the human brain." " When 
fully grown," says another scientist, " there is al- 
most nothing in man's anatomy to distinguish 
him from his nearest allies among other animals. 
Almost bone for bone, nerve for nerve, muscle for 
muscle, he is the same." A human's appetites are 
the same as a pig's, only more aesthetic; what he 
calls competition is just a bull-dog's combative- 
ness refined; and his acquisitiveness is the bee's 
instinct at work in a steel, fire-proof hive of in- 
dustry. A human is a perfect animal, and more. 
There is in man an inward self which science says 
puts a gulf between man and the animals, an in- 
ward self which makes the most ignorant savage 



JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 93 

more different from a horse, than a horse is from 
an oyster. Sir Oliver Lodge writes about the 
" soul " as something different from the " body," 
something different, too, from the thing which 
keeps an animal alive; he says man has a body, 
and man is a soul. A horse is bred for body; 
weight, pace and cleanness of limb count in him; 
but a man is valued not for the body, the muscle, 
form and features. This is what we desire in a 
man, the man who is to be our comrade, our legis- 
lator, our teacher, our physician, a keen sense of 
" ought " and " ought not/' a great will, a deep 
reverence for law, a consciousness of a relation- 
ship which reaches outward as far as humanity 
goes, upward as far as infinity. It is character we 
seek to culture in man; the inward, not the out- 
ward we set store by in human nature. As Amiel 
suggests, " man begins his career as a tamer of 
wild beasts and these wild beasts are his passions.' ' 
And now, see how the parables fit. Given a 
man who lives all his life for the lusts of the 
minute, for fine food, a rich wardrobe, a great 
house ; in mere getting and spending he lays waste 
his powers ; his ideal is to come to a time when he 
can say to himself, thou hast much goods laid up 
for many years, take thine ease, eat, drink and be 
merry. What is this man doing but living for the 
herbs and the grass of things, the things which 
to-day are and to-morrow are cast into the oven? 



94 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

What figure fits him so well as a sheep which has 
heard the call of the wild, gone back into the 
wilderness life with its primal compulsions and 
its animal instincts? Given a man whose aim 
in life is to win public applause, and so to have 
power; to be masterful, to be called influential, to 
have people nudge one another when he passes 
in the street. This man wants to sit at a desk, 
touch a button and see men jump at his ring; all 
he cares for is to say " go," and have the satis- 
faction of being obeyed, to have his way, to make 
his will law. To him the world is just a shop full 
of tools cunningly constructed to serve his ends, 
to minister to him, to be used by him. What 
figure fits this man better than a coin which has 
ceased to be of use, a thing which has dropped 
from its true purpose; he is taking others' time 
and strength instead of using his time and 
strength in the service of others ; he is costing the 
world labor instead of spending himself that the 
world may have what it needs. Given a man who 
never comes up out of the basement of his being, 
who never takes a thought for the furnishing of 
the upper stories of life where lives his soul, who 
is busy with his own affairs, so busy that he never 
hears the call of an Unseen Central giving him con- 
nection with a great outside world-need of him 
and his. What is this man but a son squandering 
his divine share of life, wasting his real self, 



JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 95 

playing the fool with his birthright, and depriving 
the family of the help of his companionship. It 
is this reversion to the animalism in us, this use- 
lessness in the world struggle to develop soul, this 
denial of our divine heredity which is the tap-root 
of the wrongness in human nature. Self-absorp- 
tion, lovelessness, the higher-self suicide, that is 
Jesus' idea of what is the matter with man. To 
live like a higher kind of animal and nothing 
more; to live to be served rather than to serve; 
to live as if God were dead, that, according to 
Jesus, is sin. 

Jesus says our wrongness has a three-fold 
cause ; He says we go wrong from heredity, from 
circumstance, from our own volition. He allows 
that human nature starts with a handicap, a 
legacy of self-absorption which we get at birth. 
We are like sheep that go astray; like sheep in 
whose very blood is the wander-lust. We are not 
simply individuals, we are children of parents, 
and behind the parents, far back in the dim dis- 
tance, is the brute ancestry, whose low bequest is 
not yet sloughed off. The lower life had a long 
start before the higher was awakened, and it is 
strong yet; it is not all domesticated, not all 
tamed. All this the Master seems to appreciate. 
And He sees another fact; how, even with a fair 
start, things and men around us sometimes help 
us to badness, give us a shove off, make the down- 



96 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

hill road all the easier. We are like a coin which 
gets lost by no act of its own ; it falls from a care- 
less hand, and is given the start which sends it 
rolling off into the dust. Not always is the crown 
jewel deliberately thrown away, sometimes it is 
snatched from the head by the hand of some moral 
brigand. This baneful possibility of circum- 
stances the fair Christ seems to allow as one of 
the causes of the wrongness in human nature. 

But He does not stop with making man a 
sheep; had Jesus told us only the parable of the 
lost sheep, we might have questioned His optim- 
ism. He does not finish with the parable of the 
lost piece of money; had Jesus stopped there we 
would have called Him a fatalist. 

"If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than 

their own, 
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be 

mute ? " 

You cannot jam back into heredity and en- 
vironment all the impulses which brought about 
the moral failure. Something more needs to be 
said. There is a personal will at the center of 
life, and our very sense of fairness challenges 
every reference of life's wrongness to any source 
which does not take account of this personal ini- 
tiative. The Principal of Birmingham says, 
" The distinctive character of man is that he has 
a sense of responsibility for his acts, having ac- 



JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 97 

quired the power of choosing between good and 
evil, with freedom to obey one motive rather than 
another." There is something in the wrongness 
which man himself makes up out of whole cloth. 
Maybe we are an organ, and the pipes and action 
were set up without our choosing; maybe the reg- 
isters were limited by a builder whom we did not 
employ. But we sit on the organ bench, and our 
fingers touch the keys, and there is enough in the 
instrument to make sweet music, aye, great music. 
Palestrina wrote " The Strife is O'er " long be- 
fore the days of electric actions, tilting couplers 
and echo attachments. With our eyes wide open, 
we have listened to the call of the wild, we have 
misused our manhood, we have used our wills. 

A young man decides to be a better man ; he be- 
gins the effort from the outside and works inward. 
First, there are the long habits to be wrestled with ; 
he will not drink; he will not swear; he will not 
be unchaste. And hard that fight is, for his fa- 
ther before him drank, it was his father he first 
heard swear, it is the father's passion which runs 
like fire through his veins. Almost he despairs; 
it looks like a losing battle, but he keeps on. He 
finds the same enemies in his circumstances; the 
business he is in is full of temptations, he gives 
up his business; his associations keep him in the 
bad atmosphere, he breaks away from the old 
comrades ; the reading he has loved fans the flame 



98 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

of the red passion, the old books are burned. So 
far, so good; he has met his hereditation, he has 
faced his conditions, still the old habit stays by 
him, the old impulse has steam, the old appetite's 
fires will not be put out. Then it is the young 
fighter in this moral arena sees the fact of life; 
he sees that at the mysterious center of his being 
there is he himself, he himself who not only thinks, 
and feels and does the wrong, but is wrong. Fa- 
cing that fact solemnly, seriously, the young man 
has come up to the point where real victory be- 
gins. " / have sinned," he cries ; " the fault lies 
with myself." And with this sight of self, this 
resolution to be his higher self, he makes the dis- 
covery that Jesus meant every lost life to make in 
these parables, that God will take care of the 
heredity, God will take care of the circumstances ; 
the shepherd will find the sheep, the woman will 
find the coin, the son must come to himself, must 
cry, " Father, I have sinned." This self-discov- 
ery, this sense of unworthy sonship brings peace 
and strength and safety. 

This is sin as Jesus sees it, to live the lower 
life, to live to be served rather than to serve, to 
live as if God were dead. And this is safety, to 
come to one's self and own one's sonship, saying, 
" Father, I have sinned." 



VI 

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 



"He entered and was passing through Jericho. And be- 
hold, a man called by name Zacchaeus ; and he was a chief 
publican, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who 
He was; and could not for the crowd, because he was little 
of stature. And he ran on before, and climbed up into a 
sycamore tree to see him: for He was to pass that way. 
And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up, and said 
unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to- 
day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and 
came down, and received Him joyfully. And when they saw 
it, they all murmured, saying, He is gone in to lodge with 
a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said 
unto the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give 
to the poor; and if I have wrongfully exacted aught of 
any man, I restore fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, To- 
day is salvation come to this house, forasmuch as he also 
is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek 
and to save that which was lost" 



VI 
JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 

If there is any word of religion we ought to 
know about it is the word " salvation." In the 
vocabulary of religion no word bulks so large. 
Christianity has no patent on it. Professor James 
has shown us how it is part of the " uniform de- 
liverance in which religions all appear to meet." 
No sect of Christianity can claim it as peculiar to 
its dialect. Paul preached it and Peter, Augus- 
tine and Pelagius, Luther and Loyola, Calvin and 
Arminius, Spurgeon and Martineau, Brooks and 
Channing. The monks and parish clergy of the 
Greek Church, the popes and priests of the Roman 
Church, and the pastors and teachers of the 
Protestant Church have proclaimed it in all times 
and in all places. All religions, all sects acknowl- 
edge the need and fact of salvation; the thing 
needs no argument; it is taken for granted. We 
differ as to that from which or for which we are 
saved, but the saving — about this the vote is 
unanimous. 

In Christian preaching there has been a singular 

IOI 



102 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

unity about the message of salvation. This may 
not seem obvious at first sight. In the faint light 
of early morning the Priscilla threads her way 
down the East River. The young man on his 
first visit to the city, rising betimes, quits his 
stateroom to go out on deck. There, like a great 
cobweb spun between the two boroughs, he sees 
the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge. He admires the 
graceful superstructure hanging between earth 
and sky; he wonders at the great ships which, 
sailing underneath, are dwarfed into insignifi- 
cance; he tries to imagine the vast throng which 
in a single day is poured back and forth between 
the two islands; but he overlooks the most won- 
derful fact of all — the enduring foundations 
which the Bridge itself feels as it throbs and 
sways beneath its awful responsibility. To find 
these one must trace the span to the water's edge 
and pierce the flood. There, out of sight, under 
the seething waters, resting on the bosom of the 
earth, are mighty tiers of basal masonry, cemented 
by human skill and sacrifice, which hold aloft the 
giant columns that make possible so much of use- 
fulness and imposing beauty. So it is the Church's 
superstructure, the high beauty of its worship, the 
shifting panorama of doctrine and creed which 
have held the eye, amazed the mind or caused 
vague sensations of fear for its future; but the 
Church itself has felt beneath all this the un- 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 103 

shaken fundamental, the need and fact of salva- 
tion through Jesus Christ the Lord. 

This unit of truth may be divided into four 
parts. The first is the reality of sin. Every- 
where we find sin. No man is all that he ought to 
be; every one follows the call of the wild; every 
one likes to be served rather than to serve ; every 
one sometimes lives as if God were dead. There 
is a feeling of moral nausea; if one does not feel 
it, he knows it ought to be there. Kipling's Mac- 
intosh had burned his brain up with the drink, had 
fallen so low that it seemed as if just a whiff 
would bowl him over the line that separates the 
human from the brute; yet here is what he said 
when he was dying, " I was drunk, filthily drunk. 
I, who am the son of a man with whom you have 
no concern, I, who was once fellow of a college 
whose buttery hatch you have not seen, I was 
loathesomely drunk. But consider how lightly I 
am touched. It is nothing to me, less than noth- 
ing. For I do not even feel the headache which 
should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how 
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bit- 
ter my repentance. On the soul which I have lost 
and on the conscience which I have killed, I tell 
you that I cannot feel." He could not feel, but 
he knew. This is the first bitter fact, we know 
there " is something wrong with us as we naturally 
stand." This is the first part of the unit of sal- 



104 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

vation. And this is the second part, the universe 
is not all bad. God is in His world and God is 
good, and God owns the world; not a sparrow 
falls on the ground without Him. The wrong- 
ness makes it no less God's world than if it were 
perfect. He still owns it and claims it and seeks 
to perfect it. This is the second fact, " God so 
loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not 
perish, but have eternal life." This is the second 
equal part of the fact of salvation. And this is 
the third part, Jesus came, and Jesus lived so 
much like God that since then men could imagine 
no better God than He and so called Him God. 
And Jesus died; and by His death men saw that 
all His life had been a sacrifice, a self-giving, a 
giving of His godlike strength to men to take the 
place of their weakness, a giving of His purity to 
them to take the place of their sin. And wherever 
the story of this life-long sacrifice went, men put 
out the fires on the altars where they had been of- 
fering blood sacrifices, thinking thus to appease an 
angry Deity; and they said God asks only to be 
loved and obeyed as Christ loved and obeyed. This 
is the third fact, Jesus came God's messenger Son 
sent to find the lost children. This is the third 
equal part of the fact of salvation. And this is 
the fourth part, by coming to God as we under- 
stand Him in Jesus, the mind of Jesus becomes 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 105 

our mind, His spirit becomes our spirit and we 
are born anew; we are made like men without a 
past, men with only a present and a future, a 
future radiant with an immortal hope. This is 
the fourth fact, men become Christlike lovers and 
doers of the right. This is the fourth equal part 
of the fact of salvation. 

These are the four equal parts of the unit of the 
Christian evangel of salvation — Sin; the God 
of the loving heart; the Christ, God's messenger 
Son sent to recover the lost children; the re-birth 
of Christlike lovers and doers of the right. No 
one of these parts is the whole evangel ; the whole 
is the sum of the four equal parts. And it is the 
whole evangel which the Church has preached and 
is preaching, the evangel which the priests and 
prophets when they are at their best, when they 
forget themselves, when they remember their liv- 
ing Lord, when they face the men who need to 
be saved, lift themselves up and sing and preach. 
This is the Christian faith in salvation, the faith 
not of one part but of the whole; this is the fact 
of salvation, the fact not of some sect but of 
Christendom; this is the practical belief not of 
Catholicism alone, nor of Protestantism, not of 
Trinitarianism nor of Unitarianism ; not of Cal- 
vinism nor of Wesleyanism; not of conservative 
nor of liberal; not of old theology nor of new 
theology; but it is the practical ecumenical belief, 



106 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

for " Faithful is the saying and worthy of all 
acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world 
to save sinners." 

So much for the unit of belief; it is not obvious 
because men will forget that the parts are equal, 
and only the sum of the parts makes the whole. 
The priest or the prophet has taken one part and 
multiplied it by his personal preference till it seems 
to him as if the part were as big as the whole. 
One takes the fact of sin, another the fact of God, 
another the fact of Christ, another the fact of 
the re-birth, and he emphasizes this part until by 
the over-emphasis it grows in his estimation and 
others' beyond its fair proportion and seems to 
equal the unit. It is easy to make one-fourth 
look bigger that it is. You have only to multiply 
numerator and denominator by two. Ask any 
child which he would rather have, one quarter or 
two eighths and he will select the latter fraction. 
And we, children that we are about truth, double 
our part till we think it twice as big as it is, cer- 
tainly larger than the same equal part given to 
another. 

This, indeed, is what makes the seeming dif- 
ferences between us. One part or another of 
the unit truth appeals to us; it is the part we 
see clearest, the part that suits our mental make- 
up, temperament, experience. And suiting best 
our individual need or taste we cherish it, fill our 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 107 

thought with it, see all other things in terms of 
it, stake our life upon it, and try to force our 
brothers with different mentalities, other tem- 
peraments, other experiences to see and think and 
feel as we. And when they will not, what is there 
to do — such children we are — we call one an- 
other " heretic " and go off and pray by our- 
selves. It is not the big unit reality of salvation 
we differ about, it is about the equal parts into 
which the unit is divided. We may deny this un- 
ity when we are in our controversial moods; but 
when we are most deeply religious, when we re- 
call how men have been and are being saved 
everywhere Jesus is lifted up, our denials are 
dumb, and we know ourselves one in the gospel of 
salvation through Jesus Christ. 

But what is the thing itself? What did Jesus 
mean when He said He had come to seek and to 
save the lost? What for instance was in His 
mind when he said to Zacchaeus, " To-day is 
salvation come to this house/' 

In Jericho there was no such social leper as 
Zacchaeus. He was head of the Roman revenue 
office. The Roman tax-collectors were not sal- 
aried men. The office was farmed out to the high- 
est bidder. Then the man who got the job set 
the tax-rate. Of course his rate covered his price 
plus his profits; he had to make something. It 
was not that that hurt Jericho half so much as to 



108 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

think that Zacchaeus was a " son of Abraham." 
A Jew serving as henchman for Rome! That 
proved that Zacchaeus had the yeast of treason 
in him. So Jericho treated him as a contagious 
person; when he entered the temple some Phari- 
see would say, " God I thank Thee that I am not 
as this publican.'' And here were Jericho's arch- 
Shylock and Jesus hand in hand. Of course peo- 
ple talked. It was a public scandal. It came 
about this way. Zacchaeus heard how the great 
Rabbi had made another publican one of his dis- 
ciples. The action was so out of the common 
that Zacchaeus was set on getting a sight of this 
friend of his friends. There was a great crowd 
in the street waiting for Jesus. Zacchaeus being 
a little man was hustled to one side and could not 
see a thing. But up street there was a tree, and 
in a twinkling he had climbed it, and from his 
leafy perch he was taking a long look at that 
wonderful face. Suddenly Jesus looked up, spied 
the man, saw the meaning of the situation and 
called out, " Zacchaeus, make haste, and come 
down; for to-day I must abide at thy house." 
Zacchaeus came down and the two men went 
home together. Only one incident of the Mas- 
ter's visit to that home has been kept for us. No 
one thought it worth while to tell what led up to 
it. Here is the whole story; when the two were 
indoors, sometime, Zacchaeus said, " Behold, 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 109 

Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; 
and if I have wrongfully exacted aught of any 
man, I restore fourfold. And Jesus said unto 
him, To-day is salvation come to this house, for- 
asmuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For 
the Son of Man came to seek and to save that 
which was lost." 

It must be evident that whatever Jesus meant 
by salvation He meant something which may come 
to a man to-day, in this world. " To-day is sal- 
vation come." The tense is present. Salvation 
is here; it is not something to be received there. 
It is ante-mortem; not post-mortem. The thing 
comes immediately; it is a possession' for this 
world not to be waited for until one has reached 
another world. Jesus put the matter in the same 
way to the unfortunate girl who came to Him 
in Simon's house, and to the blind beggar, " thy 
faith hath saved thee/' the Master said to both 
of them. So Jesus' idea of this unit of re- 
ligious experience is that it begins to-day, not the 
day after a man dies. It is not the same as being 
insured for heaven, not the same as being insured 
against hell. It is not just assurance of future 
reward, it is recovery from something, restora- 
tion to something here and now. Whatever hap- 
pened to Zacchaeus, happened that day in Jericho. 
What did happen to Zacchaeus? He was con- 
missioner of taxes for the Roman government. 



IIO THE MIND OF CHRIST 

That stamped that Jew as a reprobate; the world 
was against him; when his countrymen passed 
him in the streets they drew their skirts about 
themselves as if he had the plague; they made him 
live for himself. Excommunication he answered 
with extortion, social ostracism he matched with 
official brigandage. His work centered in graft; 
his heart centered in hate; his life centered in 
self. This man of self was the one who " stood 
and said"; there is a touch in the original lan- 
guage which does not come out in the English. 
The word translated " stood " shows a man with 
tense muscles, and set jaws, taking a deep breath 
as he turns over a new leaf. He stood thus and 
said, " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods, my 
capital, I give to the poor ; and if, as I know to be 
the case, I have wrongfully exacted aught of any 
man I restore fourfold." 

A bigger thing was happening here than shows 
on the surface. The extreme penalty the Hebrew 
law provided for theft was fourfold restitution; 
that is, the criminal was compelled to restore to 
the plaintiff four times the value of the stolen 
goods ; but this extreme penalty was imposed only 
upon that most detestable of all thieves, the mali- 
cious depredator who out of spite wantonly de- 
stroys what he has burglarized. For the thief who 
was caught with the goods on his person the pen- 
alty was double the value of the loot. But if the 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION III 

guilty man confessed and voluntarily offered to 
make amends, the law let him off with a refund of 
the principal and twenty per cent. Now it was the 
last penalty which fitted Zacchaeus' case. No 
one had accused him of theft; upon his own mo- 
tion he pleaded guilty; he was his own judge and 
imposed his own sentence, and the sentence was, 
four hundred per cent, the extreme penalty re- 
served for the worst sort of villain; and more 
than this, after he had made amends, the half of 
the residue would go to the poor. The law, had 
he confessed to the Sanhedrin would have been 
satisfied had Zacchaeus said, " If I have wrong- 
fully exacted aught of any man I restore what I 
took and a fifth more " ; but said the publican, 
" Lord, four hundred per cent I will give to every 
man I have plundered, and the rest shall be used 
for the needy." 

Here was a great confession. In the strict in- 
terpretation of the law he had plundered no one; 
Rome gave Zacchaeus the right to make all he 
could. But, standing in the presence of the great 
Rabbi whose life was full of utter kindness, look- 
ing into the candid eyes of the Friend of publicans 
and sinners, he saw himself against that white 
background and he saw himself dead black. The 
petty thieving and graft in contrast with the pa- 
tient pity and boundless self-forgetfulness of Jesus 
burned into his soul a loathing of self. He saw 



112 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

himself with Christ's eyes, He judged himself 
with Christ's conscience, he hated himself with 
Christ's hatred of sin. No mere principal and 
a fifth could fit his case as Zacchaeus now judged 
it; nothing but the extremest penalty could sat- 
isfy his conscience. This is what happened to 
Zacchaeus; he saw himself, what he was and 
what he ought to be; he called his old self by its 
proper name, and facing right about he reached 
out for the self he had not been, but in the pres- 
ence of the Christ knew that he must be. He was 
saved, saved, from the wrath of God? saved from 
the fear of future punishment? maybe; but cer- 
tainly, obviously he was saved from himself; from 
his old lust of getting, from his old vengeful feel- 
ings of hate, from the guilt of the selfishness which 
cut him off from his fellows and his God. And 
so salvation is not rescue from a future hell, it is 
rescue from a present self. 

More than all this; the man is not only 
saved from self, but he is saved for service. 
" Fourfold restitution," said Zacchaeus, " for 
every one I have plundered; and the half of my 
capital I give to the poor." And Jesus said, " To- 
day is salvation come to this house." The change 
in the man is radical, absolute. He is thrown off 
his center. An hour ago his work centered in 
graft, now it centered in giving; his heart cen- 
tered in hate, now it centered in charity; his life 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 113 

centered in self, now it centered in others. From 
living to wrong, he began living to right, to right 
not only those he had wronged but those whom 
others had wronged. His lower nature surren- 
dered to his higher, the grinder of the face of the 
poor became the care-taker of the life of the op- 
pressed; the moral anarchist became the loyal 
subject of the kingdom of God, where the law 
is boundless, ungrudging, gratuitous love. This 
is what salvation meant to Zacchaeus, something 
immediate, something which concerned character, 
something which concerned his fellow men. It 
meant immediate rescue from the slavery of the 
self, immediate subjection to the mastery of love. 
In a word salvation for this publican was son- 
ship, simple trust in a Father's forgiveness, child- 
like solicitude for the welfare of the other chil- 
dren. 

It is interesting to discover that the word " sal- 
vation " as first used by Jesus did not have a dis- 
tinctly religious meaning. He was used to us- 
ing it about the folks He healed of bodily sick- 
ness. " Daughter " said the Master to the in- 
valid woman who pressed through the throng 
to touch the hem of His garment, " be of good 
comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole." And 
it is written in St. Mark's gospel " They laid the 
sick in the marketplaces, and besought Him that 
they might touch if it were but the border of His 



114 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

garment ; and as many as touched Him were made 
whole." " Made whole " in these verses translates 
the same Greek word as " saved." Saved folks 
were folks who were made whole, filled full of 
health, fulfillng their purpose. Up to this day, 
Zacchaeus had been like a sick man, just a frag- 
ment of a man, a man who was able to use only 
a part of himself; just as a sick man is a man who 
cannot use his eyes, or his limbs, or his head, or 
whatever part of him is afflicted. When the sick 
man is made whole he lives through all his being; 
he no longer uses only a portion of his body; 
every organ functions perfectly. Zacchaeus' con- 
science was diseased; his love organ had never 
functioned. When Jesus touched him that 
day, his conscience began to work, his love 
organ began to function, and with the con- 
science in perfect health, and the love in him 
claiming those who had need of him, the pub- 
lican began to live through and through all 
his manhood ; henceforth no part was diseased, no 
organ was atrophied; he was a whole man. 

This then is Jesus' idea of salvation : — it is not 
a matter of the future, it concerns the present ; it is 
not rescue from a future hell, but rescue from a 
present self; it is not rescue for a future heaven, 
it is rescue for a present service. Salvation is liv- 
ing as a son through all one's being; salvation is 
living as a soul for other souls. 



JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 115 

There remains but one question and the answer 
to it is very simple. What saved Zacchaeus? 
Jesus and he got together, and Zacchaeus sur- 
rendered to Jesus' mastery. The picture of how 
Jesus saves is always with us in the way men save 
one another. The physician saves a life; that is, 
he comes to the sick one day after day; day after 
day he gives the sick one hope, courage, knowl- 
edge, skill, medicine, in short he gives the sick 
one himself, for the hope and the courage, the 
knowledge and the skill and the medicine are really 
the physician's spirit; then in turn the sick one 
gives the physician obedience, and through the 
patient's obedience, the physician's spirit passes 
over into the patient and he is made whole. Obe- 
dience is the organ of life. Through obedience 
all the life we have comes to us. It was obedi- 
ence to the physician which saved the physical life 
when he found you the day of the accident unable 
to use yourself; it was obedience to the teacher 
which saved your intellectual life when school 
found you as a child using only a part of your 
intellectuality. It is obedience to the Master 
which saves the soul life from dying down with 
animalism, mis-use and indifference. This is how 
Jesus saves a man. On the white screen of His 
life a man sees his real life — what he is and what 
he can be. By His pitying love for man He 
makes the man hate what he is and reach out to 



Il6 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

what he can be. By a man's obedience to Him, 
Jesus goes into the man's inward life and the man 
is saved from what he is for what he can be. y 



VII 
JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 



" Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. 
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on 
earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us 
our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring 
us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For 
Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for- 
ever. Amen." 



VII 

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 

Every man prays sometime; he cannot help it. 
" Out of the deeps " do we cry " O God." In one 
of the Psalms there are four cartoons; four men 
are seen, each one of them has been driven into 
a pocket from which there is no escape. The first 
is a man bewildered by the riddle of existence; 
he beats about in the dust of doubt like a caravan 
gripped in a sand-storm; there is no way nor 
water ; " his soul faints in him, then he cries unto 
Jehovah in his trouble." The next is a man in the 
clutch of disease; he lies helpless as if his limbs 
were bound round with hoops of steel ; " there is 
none to help, then he cries unto Jehovah in his 
trouble." The third is a man who has played the 
fool with his manhood; the tide of poison is ris- 
ing over his heart ; " he draws near unto the gates 
of death, then he cries unto Jehovah in his 
trouble." The last is a captain of industry; he is 
doing business in great waters ; but the waters have 
seized his ship, and there is no voice from the 
shore, no vessel to stand by ; " he is at his wits' 

119 



120 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

end, then he cries unto Jehovah in his trouble." 
Four men, one facing doubt, another disease, an- 
other death, another disaster, and each time it is 
the same story, out of the deeps he cries " O 
God " ; in other words he prays. The easy-going 
skeptic swinging along the familiar way of the 
usual suddenly steps off into the unexpected, and 
in spite of himself, the soul in him lays hold of 
the Soul of the universe. When we are most our- 
selves we pray; it is the humanest act of life. 

" What are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer." 

Religion might be defined as morality plus 
prayer. Morality is the recognition of a relation- 
ship between man and man. Religion is the rec- 
ognition of a relationship between man and God. 
Prayer is the expression of the Godward practice 
of religion; morality is the expression of the man- 
ward practice of religion. Religion is sheer mor- 
ality until there is a vital act in which a man comes 
into touch with the " Power not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness/' Morality becomes re- 
ligion when it feels that the relation between man 
and man draws its reason out of the relation be- 
tween man and God. Of no function of the spirit- 
ual life does Jesus speak more simply than of 
prayer; no movement of the inward life does 
He Himself illustrate more beautifully than that 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 121 

" mystery 
Where God-in-man is one with man-in-God." 

The silences of a great teacher are as significant 
as His speech. When we review Jesus' words 
about prayer we are struck with a singular omis- 
sion, He says little or nothing about prayer as a 
duty. He does not argue, He proceeds. The 
physical director wastes time if he makes a dis- 
sertation on the duty of breathing. The breath- 
ing will be done and it will be done more 
and better without being made one of the require- 
ments for gymnastic work. And so the great 
spiritual director takes something for granted. 
If His class is to grow souls, the spiritual dia- 
phragms may be expected to move without a 
" must" This omission of a rule requiring 
prayer is all the more significant because a rule 
would have been the first thing a rabbi of Jesus' 
day would have given his disciples. The subject 
of prayer was a profound study with the religious 
specialists. Praying was an art to be acquired 
by long practice; and efficiency could be acquired 
only by nice and punctilious performance of ste- 
reotyped forms. The number of prayers for each 
day, and the times and the verbiage were exactly 
prescribed; variation was prohibited and the ex- 
tempore v/as proscribed. The notion of the age 
was that God required prayers as a king requires 
taxes. If one defaulted in prayers he ran a risk 



122 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

with heaven analogous to the risk he would run 
with the publican if he defaulted with his taxes. 
When a man said his prayers his accounts with 
God were squared; if he said more than was re- 
quired he became a favorite at the divine court. 
To bribe God was as good form and as expedient 
as to bribe the government. But Jesus could not 
say prayers ; " do not babble as the heathen do," 
said He, " for they think they shall be heard for 
their much speaking." He deliberately ignored, 
sometimes even purposely violated the systematic. 
For Him prayer was something natural, spon- 
taneous, filial ; it was in the category with a child's 
kiss; to make rules for the one were as absurd as 
to make rules for the other. 

Everything that the Master said about prayer 
is implied in that great prayer He gave His 
friends when they asked Him to teach them how 
to pray. " Our Father who art in heaven," 
its foreword holds His total idea of prayer, 
prayer's motive, method and matter. Of His 
prayers which have been saved for us all begin in 
the same way, " Father." And so prayer reduced 
to its simpest terms is just the Father and a son 
getting together to confer about mutual interests. 
Mutual interests, for it goes without the say- 
ing that the Father is interested in what concerns 
the son, and the son is or should be interested in 
what concerns the Father. But there is the rub; 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 12 3 

the son is apt to forget that the Father cares, 
needs to feel that the " heavenly Father knoweth 
that ye have need of all these things/' needs the 
deep sunk sense of trust that if the Father feeds 
the birds and clothes the grass of the field He 
will provide what we shall eat and wherewithal 
we shall be clothed. And not only so but the son 
is prone to forget the Father's way, needs to be 
reminded of His kingdom and His righteousness, 
needs to have the son spirit in him plenished by 
the Holy Spirit which the Father gives to them 
that ask Him. 

And so the great thing, the ultimate spiritual 
achievement is to be able to say u Father " and 
saying it to feel it as the realest fact of time and 
eternity. And prayer becomes the effort of the 
son to deepen, enrich, strengthen the sense of 
union which the name " Father " implies. " Hal- 
lowed be Thy name," that Name which makes the 
world just a parent's home and all the folks in 
it one's brothers; hallowed be that Name which 
makes the law of the home love. And " Thy 
will be done, as in heaven, so on earth," let that 
law of love be our law; let all the details of liv- 
ing, the daily bread, the daily trespass, the daily 
hurt, the daily struggle feel its permanence and 
its power. " Our Father who art in heaven, Hal- 
lowed be Thy name," with that word the son re- 
alizes his sonship and overcomes all inward anxi- 



124 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

ety. " Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on 
earth," with that word the son defeats his egoism 
and knows himself one with the Father in His 
sublime purpose of love. And this is prayer, first 
a restful trust in, and second a positive devote- 
ment to the royal will of the Father. 

That is the unique in Jesus' idea of prayer. 
Men had thought of prayer as a means to get the 
deity to do their will. Jesus thought of prayer as 
the means by which He got Himself to do the 
Father's will. By it man sought to master the 
gods. By it Jesus sought to have the Father 
master Him. Jacob with prayer thinks to make 
a bargain wherein God's service will be procured 
for his side. Jesus with prayer trustfully com- 
mits Himself to the service of God. Jacob's 
prayer is " human selfishness addressing itself 
naively to the selfishness of Jehovah." Jesus' 
prayer is the disinterested abandonment of self 
and devotement to a God of love. The one would 
have heaven go his way; the other would make 
Himself go heaven's way. The one says, " not 
Thy will but mine be done." The other says, 
" not my will but Thine be done." 

This then is Jesus' teaching about prayer : — it 
is not a sort of etiquette to be paid to God; a 
child has no need of many words or great words 
to get His Father's ear, or make His Father under- 
stand. " If ye then, being evil, know how to give 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 1 25 

good gifts unto your children, how much more 
shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit 
to them that ask Him ? " Prayer is not an at- 
tempt to wrestle something from God which He 
will give only after struggle; a father knows his 
child's needs before the child asks. " Your heav- 
enly Father knoweth that ye have need of all 
these things." Prayer is not a struggle to win 
the favor of a god who is against us ; " seek ye 
first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all 
these things shall be added unto you." But 
prayer is the search for a realer appreciation of 
God's Fatherhood; it is the loss of egoism in 
trustful sonship; it is the surrender of self to a 
loving power whose kingship we would have pene- 
trate thought, feeling and will. Prayer is the 
son coming to the Father with whom he knows 
himself to be in business, to get the Father's 
orders for the doing of the business. 

A clear sight of this idea of prayer ought to 
clean up with quiet evaporation all the perplex- 
ing questions which befog and mildew our thoughts 
about prayer. There is the idea that it is use- 
less to pray because the universe is everywhere 
bound by laws to which the Almighty God must 
be true. There is the other notion that since God 
is good and makes all things work together for 
good, it is an impertinence to ask Him for any- 
thing. But get Jesus' idea settled firmly among 



126 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

our religious hypotheses — prayer is not an ef- 
fort to get God to do our will, but a positive com- 
mitment of ourselves to His will and the whole 
atmosphere lights up. The man who follows 
Jesus' way of praying does not regard prayer as 
chiefly for specific things ; he does not believe that 
God will give him everything he asks for, nor does 
he even desire this. He recalls that his Master 
prayed, " Father, if it be possible let this cup pass 
from me," and the cup did not pass from Him. 
For the Christian prayer seeks not a change in 
things, but a change in character, such a reform- 
ing of the inward life as shall make it conform to 
the Father's Image. The thing he seeks in prayer 
is not outward, but inward, the peace which pas- 
seth understanding as St. Paul puts it in that 
masterly description of prayer and what comes 
of it, " In nothing be anxious; but in everything 
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let 
your requests be made known unto God. And 
the peace of God, which passeth all understand- 
ing, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in 
Christ Jesus." 

Prayer thought of in Jesus' way will not be 
tested by so-called " answers," that is by the num- 
ber of things received as a direct result of peti- 
tion. But this will be its value judgment — does 
prayer uplift life, does it take the whine out of 
us, does it fit the life into the " omnipresent ethi- 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 127 

cal trend " of things, does it give a push to the 
uprise of the world by adjusting the finite desire 
to the infinite design? That is the only prayer- 
test. Years ago Professor Tyndall challenged the 
religious world to a trial of prayer. A selected 
number of patients in a hospital were to be prayed 
for, and the efficacy of prayer was to be deter- 
mined by the results. When that challenge was 
declined the ungodly mocked, and some among 
the godly felt as if faith had been eclipsed. But 
the whole thing was as foolish as it was ignorant. 
And now from those very London hospitals comes 
a medical estimate of prayer. At a recent meeting 
of the British Medical Association, the Superin- 
tendent of the Bethlem Royal Hospital said, " As 
an alienist and one whose whole life has been con- 
cerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would 
state that of all hygienic measures to counteract 
disturbed sleep, depressed spirits, and all the mis- 
erable sequels of a distressed mind, I would un- 
doubtedly give the first place to the simple habit 
of prayer. Let there be but a habit of nightly 
communion, not as a mendicant or repeater of 
words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, but 
as a humble individual who submerges or asserts 
his individuality as an integral part of a greater 
whole. Such a habit does more to clean the spirit 
and strengthen the soul to overcome mere inci- 
dental emotionalism than any other therapeutic 



128 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

agent known to me." Tyndall thought prayer 
was petition for things, he had Jacob's idea. Dr. 
Hyslop defines prayer as self-adjustment to the in- 
finite, " assertion of individuality as an integral 
part of a greater whole," he has Jesus' idea. In 
a word according to Jesus' teaching prayer is the 
practice of the presence of our Father. 

What that practice means comes out clearest 
in the way the Master Himself prayed. It gives 
one pause to discover, as a great Scotch preacher 
suggests, that when Jesus prayed something 
serious happened ; " His praying was not the mere 
preparation or discipline for the battle, but the 
battlefield and the battle itself." Dr. George 
Adam Smith points out that our Lord's praying 
times were the times fullest of effort, strain and 
struggle. At first thought it might seem other- 
wise, that the restfulest hours for Him were those 
when He was in communion with God, that the 
strain and drain on Him came with His ministry 
to diseased bodies and dull minds. But the gospels 
leave another impression. He who could work a 
miracle with a word, refute His enemies with a 
sentence, and confront the majesty of Rome with 
composure, could not pray for Himself without 
effort, exhaustion, even anguish. We see Him 
on the day of His baptism, that day when He 
made His august self-discovery and retired into the 
wilderness to be alone with His God, to talk with 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 1 29 

His Father about His mission, its meaning and its 
methods. And along the lines of the narrative 
we catch the sounds of a stupendous struggle 
wherein light and darkness fought their eternal 
battle in His soul for days and days. The place 
of prayer became His arena. We see Him again 
at the tomb of Lazarus, lifting His soul in prayer 
and the record is " he groaned in the spirit and 
was troubled." A few days before His death 
as He heard the approaching footfalls of the mes- 
sengers who were to rob him of life He prayed, 
" Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall I 
say? Father, save me from this hour. But for 
this cause came I unto this hour, Father, glorify 
Thy name." And on the night before He died, 
the night when the friends who had stood beside 
Him all along, could follow Him no farther, He 
stepped aside under the kindly loneliness of the 
olive trees to meet His Father, and kneeling there 
He prayed, " Father, if Thou be willing, remove 
this cup from me; nevertheless not my will but 
Thine be done. And being in an agony He 
prayed more earnestly; and His sweat became as 
it were great drops of blood falling down upon the 
ground." 

To Jesus praying meant fighting. He made it 
the field on which He settled the problems of life; 
it was His arena where He grappled hand-to-hand 
with temptation; there He won Flis victories over 



130 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

self ; there He achieved that sublime serenity which 
upbore Him through the days of enervating toil 
and gave Him that magnificent carriage which 
made His crucifixion an enthronement and not a 
failure. The Christ's practise matched His pre- 
cept. He taught that prayer meant self-revision, 
defeat of the ego, surrender to the Father's will. 
By parable, sermon and model prayer He showed 
how all prayer began and ended in a wish for the 
kingdom's coming; and so His own prayers are 
covered with the dust of the battlefield, they are 
wet with sweat and blood. Beside that tragedy 
in the wilderness where for a month and more 
He faced one by one the traditional ideals, and 
made His own ideals of the Messiahship sub- 
ject to the great new vision of God's Son He had 
gained; beside that lonely fight under the olive 
trees in the night when the lifting of His will 
Godward brought the blood-drops to His brow, 
how tame, flat, insipid and powerless are the 
things we call prayers wherein with easy assur- 
ance we snatch at any glittering blessing that 
catches the eye, or make requisition upon Al- 
mightiness for the satisfaction of our insignificant 
desires. 

Prayer means the daily defeat of one's own 
will by the will of the divine Father. And 
that costs, and the need of that is constant. For 
life is a running fight for the Christian. Not 



JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 131 

even He who from childhood had been about His 
Father's business could face death without saying 
again, and the saying it meant sweat and blood, 
" Not my will but Thine be done." Three hun- 
dred years ago John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, 
wrote, and each one of us may say it for himself, 

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun, 

Which was my sin, though it were done before? 
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run, 
And do run still, though still I do deplore? 
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, 
For I have more. 

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won 
Others to sin, and made my sin their door? 
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun 
A year or two, but wallowed in a score? 
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, 
For I have more. 

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun 

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; 
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son 
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore; 
And having done that, Thou hast done, 
I fear no more. 



VIII 
JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 



" I am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth 
on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever 
liveth and believeth on me shall never die." 

" In my Father's house are many mansions ; if it were 
not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place 
for you." 

" To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." 

" There ran one to Him, and kneeled to Him, and asked 
Him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit 
eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou 
me good? none is good save one, even God. Thou knowest 
the commandments, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, 
Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, 
Honor thy father and mother. And he said unto Him, 
Teacher, all these things have I observed from my youth. 
And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said unto him, 
One thing thou lackest : go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and 
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : 
and come, follow me. But his countenance fell at the 
saying, and he went away sorrowful : for he was one that 
had great possessions." 



VIII 

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 

In 1883, when he stood upon the edge of three 
score years, a noted scientist wrote to a friend, 
" It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to 
the thought of extinction increasing as I get older 
and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all 
sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900 
I shall probably know no more than I did in 1800. 
I had sooner be in hell." The words are Hux- 
ley's; they might be any man's. For of all the 
black-winged doubts which seek to breed in the 
human mind, there is none so ugly, so persistent, 
so unwelcome as the doubt of immortality. It is 
an ancient, ill-omened bird, this doubt of immor- 
tality ; good men in all times have reported seeing 
it. But somehow these recent years its brood has 
grown in numbers and pugnacity, until there is 
hardly a mind in which the doubt has not tried to 
nest; while from many a soul it has driven the 
song-birds of faith and hope, and though often 
beaten off, it has persisted iri hatching out its 
brood until all the blue above is noisy with its 

135 



136 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

woeful clamor and shadowed with its sable pin- 
ions. Even among the faithful there is much 
restless uncertainty crying, " Lord, I believe, help 
thou my unbelief/' and many who sincerely be- 
lieve in God and Christ do not know surely 
whether they have faith in the immortality of the 
soul. 

The new habit of science with its thirst for facts, 
its hunger for truth, and its insatiable demand for 
evidence, has done much to bring about this doubt. 
Those who used the test-tube and the microscope 
reported that they could find in life no immortality, 
and over the heart of man there came a great 
despair, and the feeling that there had come an 
end to faith. But what men ought to know is that 
this science which bred unfaith, though so new, 
is already out of date; the loud-mouthed dogma- 
tism which trusted only what it could see with the 
eyes of flesh, has been repudiated, and now science 
talks of an unseen world which, as Prof. Shaler 
puts it, is " a realm of unending and infinitely 
varied originations." Beginning like the Italian 
peasant, who, spading his field, suddenly saw his 
spade sink through the familiar earth and drop 
out of sight, to be found again among the glori- 
ous buried ruins of Herculaneum, science has 
broken through into a world behind the minutest 
visible thing its microscope can see. Not yet may 
science say, " I know the fact of immortality," 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 137 

because its code forbids it to speak confidently of 
what it may not demonstrate ; not yet is it able to 
prove that our dead are, because its field of ob- 
servation is bounded by the little mounds " where 
angels walk and seraphs are the wardens " ; but 
the men of science are bold to say as John Fiske, 
" For my own part I believe in the immortality 
of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept 
demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme 
act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work;" 
or as Sir Oliver Lodge, " I believe we may enter 
into the life eternal ; by which I mean that whereas 
our terrestrial existence is temporary, our real 
existence continues without ceasing." So then 
when to-day the Church repeats its belief in the 
life everlasting, from the laboratories a voice 
seems to answer in antiphon, " the life everlast- 
ing," a voice, not like religion's to be sure, un- 
questioning, unhesitating, but a voice still tremu- 
lous and restrained, a voice of unspeakable depth 
and richness, hoping for more than it dare yet to 
prove. 

Science says, you may believe in immortality. 
You may believe because the universe shows an 
eternal purpose; man is the terminal station in 
the stupendous age-long process which we call 
evolution; man is the chief end and glory, the tip 
and top of this developing scheme. Says a great 
evolutionist, " the more thoroughly we compre- 



138 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

hend the process of evolution, the more we are 
likely to feel that to deny the everlasting per- 
sistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob 
the whole process of its meaning." To say that a 
soul died would be to give the lie to evolution. 
To suppose that a bacillus or a brain-clot could 
kill a soul were to think a bean could dam Ni- 
agara. You may believe, says science, because 
nature knows no annihilation only change of form; 
every end in matter is only a new beginning, an- 
other embodiment. The coal-stuff decomposed by 
fire is recomposed as light and heat; the irides- 
cent globule of dew vanishes to find itself again 
in the floating cloud. Can mind be less than coal 
or dew? To think so were to stand nature on its 
head; the law of conservation cries out that the 
soul we " loved long since and lost awhile " still 
is and is with us, 

" Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is." 

History says, you may believe in immortality. 
We take her hand and she leads us through the 
ages as through the long drawn out aisles and 
gloomy crypts of some ancient cathedral. Strange 
are the fires we see burning on many altars; un- 
savory is the incense we smell arising from many 
censers; repellent to us are many of the rites we 
discover practised in many corners of the vast 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 139 

pile. But from every chapel and chancel, from 
every stall and transept, from cloister, crypt and 
clerestory re-echoes one consenting phrase in the 
speech of every nation and tribe and people, like 
the sound of many waters, " I believe in the life 
everlasting." Everywhere with all men there has 
been a quarrel with death. Six thousand years 
ago the Egyptian wrote his " Book of the Dead," 
and based his whole theory of life on the idea 
of another world. " Mistaken " reads the 
Bhavagad Gita, " is he who thinks the soul can 
be destroyed." Confucianism's whole creed is a 
belief in the life everlasting, its worship a revering 
of its ancestors. Vague and unsatisfactory the 
Christian finds the Old Testament when he seeks 
for expression of confidence in the life eternal, 
but that the Jew believed that death was not ex- 
tinction, any one may see who reads such stories 
as the Witch of Endor, the translation of Enoch 
and the radiant ascension of Elijah, or studies 
those stanzas in the Psalms and portions of the 
prophets which, breaking upward like springs of 
sweet water in the bitter surge, deny the possi- 
bility that God can relinquish to the grave those 
who put their trust in Him. Here is an idea so 
universal that John Fiske calls it " one of the dif- 
ferential attributes of humanity," and history says, 
it is rational to believe that so human, so universal 
a faith has its eternal complement in fact. If the 



140 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

eye argues light, and the ear music, and the con- 
science right, if every function means a corre- 
sponding environment, then this quarrel with 
death, this belief in an endless life must have its 
antiphonal fact. To doubt immortality were to 
doubt the universe. 

History says, you may believe in immortality 
because the movement of society has been uniform 
in the development of the individual and the in- 
creasing appraisement of his value. Man the 
species exists for man the person. The higher 
the race ascends the more the single individual 
is worth to it. For the man exist all those asy- 
lums and institutions, hospitals and sanatoria, 
associations and settlements which are the crown 
and characteristic of civilization. Men do not 
invest capital in the building of a Lusitania to 
carry saw-dust dolls from continent to continent. 
Such magnificence of equipment is not furnished 
to convey garbage to a dumping ground. Such 
luxury of service, such expenditure of means is 
meant to transport freight, get men whose time 
is precious to destinations across the seas. And 
shall the Supreme Master-Builder that planned 
this floating world, that spent millions of years 
building it, that furnished it with races and na- 
tions, and all for individual souls, shall this Ship- 
wright Himself standing on the bridge and guiding 
His ship full of souls it was launched for, only 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 141 

fling overboard these priceless lives and hurl them 
headlong into nothingness in the midcourse of 
their voyage to His continent? To say the poison 
cup could rot Socrates, the stake burn Savonarola, 
the bullet finish Lincoln, to suppose death brought 
the same thing to Paul and Nero, to Leo and 
Luther, to Judas and Jesus were to tear from 
history what it has found through all its course, 
" A Power not ourselves which makes for right- 
eousness." 

Science says, you may believe in immortality 
because the individual soul is the chief end of the 
working of " The Infinite and Eternal Energy 
from which all things proceed." History says, 
you may believe in immortality because the in- 
dividual soul is the darling care of that " Power 
not ourselves which makes for righteousness." 
And what science and history says you may be- 
lieve, Jesus says " I know," and the reason science 
and history give for their tentative faith, Jesus 
also gives for His assurance, " Not a sparrow 
falls on the ground without your Father ; fear not 
therefore; ye are of more value than many spar- 
rows." This is Jesus' assurance of the life ever- 
lasting, the inestimable worth of the individual 
soul to our Father who is in heaven. 

Jesus has very little to say directly about im- 
mortality. Here again He does not argue, but 
assumes. There is the great word He gave 



142 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Martha when He went to see her after Lazarus' 
death, "I am the Resurrection and the Life; he 
that believeth on Me, though he die, yet shall he 
live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on Me 
shall never die." There is the explicit statement 
about the Father's house in which there are many 
mansions, and the assurance that if there were no 
life on the other side of death, He would have 
told them, awful as it would have been to declare 
the sad fact. Then there is that tender and gra- 
cious assurance given to His comrade in cruci- 
fixion; death is not an end, not a dreamless sleep, 
not even an interruption of self-consciousness, 
" To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." 
These are the most explicit utterances which Jesus 
made of His conviction of immortality. It was 
one of the things which, from His point of view, 
went without the saying. In the course of a day's 
conversation we talk little about the sun, and in 
the course of a lifetime we never waste a minute 
arguing for the light, w T e just go on living in the 
light, thinking, speaking, doing in terms of the 
sunshine. It was that way with Jesus and the 
future life. The teaching of the Master is simply 
inexplicable on the supposition that death ends 
all. 

The Beatitudes would mean nothing and the 
parables unless there was a conscious life after the 
body was folded away. That assumption under- 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 143 

lies the story of the guest without the wedding 
garment; the builders, one of whom built on the 
sand, the other on the rock; the rich man who 
fared sumptuously every day, oblivious of the poor 
man who lay at his gate; the virgins who were 
ready for the bridegroom's coming, and the virgins 
who were caught napping and without oil in their 
lamps; and the sublime scene of the judgment, at 
which souls should be separated as a shepherd 
divides his sheep from his goats. According to 
the trend of Jesus' teaching, the whole spiritual 
content of this present life, its knowledge, its skill, 
its achievements, its character will be carried over, 
and hereafter will be just a continuation of here. 
This comes to the surface in the parable of the 
capitalist who entrusted his estate to three men. 
The agent who got five shares eventually doubled 
them, and on his master's return gave him ten. 
And what did the master do ? Simply compliment 
him and then dismiss him ? " Thou hast been 
faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler 
over many things, enter thou into the joy of thy 
lord;" this man's life was raised, not retired, con- 
tinued, not closed. 

But you come at Jesus' idea of the future life 
through His architectonic idea of God as " Our 
Father," and its corollary, His idea of life itself. 
God said Jesus is " Our Father." What it 
means for a human to call the Divine Being " Our 



144 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Father" we have already seen; it renders the 
human divine; it lifts man out of the category of 
things which death claims into another order on 
which death has no lien. A father and his chil- 
dren are shareholders in the same stock; if the 
father's shares are eternal, the children's must be, 
no matter how small may be their holdings ; were 
the children's shares rubbish, the father's were no 
better, though his holdings were infinite. Once 
grant Fatherhood in the deity and there can be 
only one conclusion, " Now are we children of 
God; we shall be like Him." Does death whiff 
us out, then death has a claim on deity; does He 
live, then death is " swallowed up in victory." 
This man claiming the divine ancestry is of in- 
estimable worth to his Father. God is like a 
shepherd; even though he have ninety-nine sheep, 
he cannot afford to lose one ; God is like a house- 
wife with nine pieces of silver, restless because 
one has rolled away ; God is like a father who has 
a home and servants and one trusting son, but 
there is one son in the far country, and the father 
watches, always watches for that boy's coming 
back. What once interlocks with the divine, re- 
mains forever interlocked; what is morally worth 
while for God once, remains worth while forever. 
As gravitation binds into one our entire solar 
system, not only planet to planet in light, and 
electron to electron in the dark, so that the fate 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 1 45 

of the smallest electron were the fate of the sun; 
so with Fatherhood Jesus joins in one the universe 
of persons; not only great spirit to great spirit in 
bliss, but soul to soul in woe, so that a soul's 
death were divine death. The power of His con- 
ception is elemental ; from Fatherhood immortality 
leaps inevitable. 

Then there is that corollary idea, Jesus' idea of 
life itself. By " life " He meant always more 
than men mean; "The life," He said, "is more 
than meat ; it consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things a man possesseth," the whole world would 
not be a fair equivalent for one life. He called it 
" eternal," which means no such colorless thing as 
mere longevity, it means a certain kind of lon- 
gevity. It is not quantity of life, but quality of 
life. On the face of the Palisades you can make 
out a series of horizontal lines running parallel to 
the river; on these lines you read the story of in- 
numerable winters when the waters were fastened 
to the banks with bands of ice, of numberless 
spring freshets which sent the waters tumbling 
along under the burden of melted snows. You 
read in these lines how the river once flowed on 
a level with the cliff, how through the centuries it 
has been cutting its way down the trap-rock till 
it reached the lower level at which it now runs; 
and the river makes you think of years and cen- 
turies; you compute time; you are aware of sea- 



146 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

sons. But farther up stream you swing in under 
Storm King, its base laved by the Hudson's flood, 
its august summit sweeping upward in silent un- 
changeableness. You forget the waters for the 
solemn peak; you cease thinking of the years and 
centuries, the time and the seasons. Storm King 
is indifferent to all these; the snows and suns have 
left no line on it, the seasons appear to have 
slipped across it like the mists through which it 
lifts its grim head. The river makes you think 
of time; the mountain makes you forget time. 
The one is of such an age, the other is ageless. 

And that is something of the difference between 
" everlasting " and " eternal/' An everlasting 
life is a life which lasts so many years ; an eternal 
life is a life with which years have nothing to do. 
Eternal life is the kind of life God has, the kind 
of life which makes things, is not made, the kind 
of life which uses the material, but is not used 
by it. It is the kind of life which may associate 
itself with a body which changes and decays, 
while it goes on from glory to glory. Its origin 
is God, its nourishment is not bread, but every 
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God, 
its attributes are love and goodness, mercy and 
self-sacrifice, things which neither come with the 
years nor age with them, things which would be 
though time stopped, things which are the vic- 
torious contradiction of change and death. This 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 147 

is what Jesus means by life; it was in the begin- 
ning with God before things were or death; it 
shall be with God when the things which death 
decompose recompose according to that mighty 
working whereby He is able to subdue all things 
unto Himself. And this divine thing, this time- 
less thing, Christ says men have, " verily, verily, 
I say unto you, He that heareth my word and be- 
lieveth Him that sent me, hath eternal life." 
Sensuous existence is not human life, human life 
is eternal, and what is eternal is divine, and on the 
divine death has no claim, the grave no lien. 
This, then, is Jesus' assurance of immortality, 
the inestimable worth of the individual to our Fa- 
ther who is in heaven. Grant His premise and 
the conclusion follows, " as we have borne the 
image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image 
of the heavenly." 

But Jesus seems to say that this Christian im- 
mortality is not only a fact, but a task. Every 
man has it potentially, but every man has it not 
practically. There is no question that life is ever- 
lasting; He seems to say that every one will live 
on and on through infinite time; but a study of 
His teaching leaves one with the impression that 
every one has not yet reached that God-like quality 
of longevity which is implied in the word 
" eternal." I have examined every reported say- 
ing of Jesus about eternal life, and I think I am 



148 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

right in saying that there is not one which does 
not make its possession contingent upon the ful- 
fillment of certain conditions. " He that be- 
lieveth in me hath eternal life" is His character- 
istic way of putting it. 

Scripture seems to make it positive that every 
soul has everlastingness, but Scripture also seems 
to make it positive that for Jesus' kind of everlast- 
ingness every soul has got to qualify. The gospels 
record a striking instance in which this is set out 
very clearly. They tell the story of a youitg man 
who came to Jesus asking, " Good Teacher, what 
shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? " The 
man was young, well-born and bred, winsome and 
reverent. At sight of him, it is said Jesus loved 
him. When Jesus inquired into his private life 
he could look straight into the face of the Master 
and say without stammering that he had kept the 
moral law from his youth up. Then it is said 
Jesus looked upon him, and the word translated 
" looked " denotes the searching glance of one 
who sees through and through. And Jesus said 
to the young patrician, " One thing thou lackest." 
Up to a certain point the young man's life was 
complete. It had all it needed ; its machinery was 
in perfect order ; there was no screw loose, no cog 
slipped. If eternal life was only an indefinite 
continuance of existence, all this young man 
needed was to go on as he had been going, keeping 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 1 49 

himself nicely adjusted to his daily surroundings. 
But the young man felt that eternal life was 
something more than keeping on forever. And 
Jesus told him what was needed for him to qualify 
for the kind of life he was looking for. " Go," 
said the Master, " sell whatsoever thou hast and 
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in 
heaven; and come, follow me." 

Did Jesus mean that by turning philanthropist 
the young man would inherit the eternal kind of 
everlastingness ? It is said that when he heard 
Jesus' method for the practise of immortality he 
went away sorrowful, and Jesus, looking after him, 
said, " How hard is it for them that trust in 
riches to enter into the kingdom of God." It was 
not the habit of almsgiving that he lacked ; it was 
the " treasure in heaven." With that look the 
Master fixed on him, He saw that the man's whole 
life centered in the things with which time deals, 
in money, investments, interest and dividends. He 
saw that the man must be lifted away from this 
time relationship, he must be put into touch with 
timeless things. He must live on and for and 
with the things which are above time, the things 
Jesus Himself stood for, a world of imperishable 
truth, a world of eternal thought, a world of god- 
like holiness and love. 

It was not something the man had which dis- 
qualified him for eternal life; the condition of it 



150 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

which Jesus imposed was not poverty. It was 
something the man lacked which kept his ever- 
lastingness from being eternal living. It was not 
the wealth, but it was the trust in the wealth in- 
hibiting all attention to anything higher which 
was keeping him just a sheer scrap of longevity. 
To qualify for Christ's kind of immortality he 
must liberate his interest, and the only way this 
could be done was to put the possessions where 
they could not interest him. Could he have held 
his wealth so loosely that it would not have ab- 
sorbed him, he might have kept the wealth and at 
the same time made good his right to the higher 
life. But the trouble was he was the sort of man 
who could not follow eternal life and follow 
wealth at the same time, and so the one or the 
other had to be given up, and Jesus said, let the 
wealth go, then come, follow me. 

So this is Jesus' regimen for eternal life — get 
into the unseen relationships, put yourself into 
your higher environment. Would you become 
eternal, you must trust the eternal, confide in the 
eternal, correspond with the eternal, " This is life 
eternal that they should know Thee the only true 
God." Christian immortality being a kind of life, 
it must be subject to the laws of life, and life, says 
one who studied the thing, is " the continuous ad- 
justment of internal relations to external rela- 
tions." That is to say, the oak-germ that is 



JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 151 

wrapped up in an acorn does not become oak until 
that oak-germ adjusts itself to, appropriates to it- 
self from its surroundings the material which is 
fitted to make oaken fibre. You get life wherever 
the organism in which the life is keeps itself in 
correspondence with its surroundings. 

If we want physical life we must appropriate, 
" have treasure in," physical things — air, light, 
bread, water, shelter. If we want intellectual 
life, we must appropriate, " have treasure in " in- 
tellectual things, truths, facts. If we want ar- 
tistic life we must appropriate, " have treasure 
in " artistic things, the beautiful in nature and hu- 
man nature. Physical environment gives life its 
physical quality ; intellectual environment gives life 
its intellectual quality. But what shall give life 
its eternal quality? The eternal environment 
is the only thing which can give life its 
eternal quality. Science, history and Scripture 
seem to vote for the everlasting survival of the 
soul; but neither science, history nor Scripture 
can prove that the soul will survive in the Christly 
way unless it be adjusted to the Christly condi- 
tions. And these conditions, surely they are not 
mere things that time rusts and rots ; they are the 
things time cannot touch — God. To this Eternal 
Father the soul must be related in childlike trust 
and brotherly love. 

The fundamental question is not — is there a 



152 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

life everlasting? It looks as if that mere fact 
would soon be demonstrated; but this is the ques- 
tion — if my soul survives everlastingly will it 
share in the " eternal life/ 5 the life that is in God? 
To him who will say " Our Father who art in 
heaven/' and saying it, mean it, and live it in- 
wardly and outwardly, comes the great assurance, 
" This corruptible must put on incorruption, and 
this mortal must put on immortality ; so when this 
corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this 
mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall 
be brought to pass the saying that is written, 
Death is swallowed up in victory." 



IX 
THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 



" Now when John heard in prison the works of the 
Christ, he sent by his disciples and said unto Him, Art 
Thou he that cometh, or look we for another? And Jesus 
answered and said unto them, Go and tell John the things 
which ye hear and see : the blind receive their sight, and 
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, 
and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings 
preached to them." 

" Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in 
me : or else believe me for the very works' sake." 



IX 

THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 

Jesus' idea of God is the essence of the gospel. 
It is the simple tincture which impregnates every 
doctrine of the Christian faith. It " is the heart 
of Christianity, its most central and esoteric 
truth/' Charles Cuthbert Hall told his Indian 
audiences, to whom he had gone to " set forth 
the innermost essence of the religion of Jesus 
Christ." In the Lord's idea of God as " Our Fa- 
ther" His thought and feeling and will live and 
move and have their being. His whole life and 
religion grow out of this sense of the Divine 
Fatherhood. Out of this assurance, at once hum- 
ble and proud, Christianity draws its vitality and 
inspiration. The reality of our religion depends 
upon the reality of Jesus' idea of God. 

But the thing is a paradox. At first glance, it 
does not look as if it were true. Measured by the 
experience of the senses it seems to fly in the face 
of congenital dislocations, shipwrecks, the exist- 
ence of human sharks, and the fact of moral ulcers 
which, draped in satin, are rolled along on rubber 

155 



156 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

tires. The Fatherhood of God is not a self-evi- 
dent fact; and no one knew that better than the 
Master. That is the point of the parable, " There 
was in a city a judge, who feared not God, and 
regarded not man : and there was a widow in that 
city, and she came oft unto him, saying, Avenge 
me of mine adversary. And he would not for a 
while: but afterward he said within himself, 
though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet be- 
cause this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, 
lest she wear me out by her continual coming." 
Jesus suggests that there is a good deal in life 
which reminds one of those law-courts in the 
Roman provinces, where the judge was unprinci- 
pled. There are times when it seems as if the right 
was in a condition of widowhood, abandoned to 
its fate by a God who, far from behaving to it as 
a loving husband, does not even maintain the 
character of a just judge in its behalf. He who 
knew that God does care dared to suggest that 
sometimes God looks as if He did not care; He 
allowed that there are circumstances in which it 
seems as if God had gone over to the enemies' 
side. The day came when the great Christ knew 
what it is to feel that way ; on Calvary there was a 
black moment when He reached for the Father's 
hand and missed it, and cried, " My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me?" And it is not 
only the wrong which round us lies which seems 



THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 1 57 

to quarrel with Jesus' idea of the Divine Father- 
hood, there is the guilt within. When a crimson 
sin or a black moral failure has jolted a man's 
conceit of himself, it is not easy to believe that the 
All-mighty, All-wise, All-perfect One is the Fa- 
ther of such a being. The best of men and the 
sanest realize that they are of the same clay with 
the felons and the defectives; and though it may 
no longer be sung in public worship Watt's old 
hymn rather than rapturous repetition of the creed 
sometimes fits our mood, 

Alas, and did my Saviour bleed, 

And did my Sovereign die? 
Would He devote that sacred head 

For such a worm as I ? " 

It is not obvious that God is a Father of bound- 
less, gratuitous, ungrudging love. So, as Dr. 
Harnack says, " Either it is nonsense, or it is the 
utmost development of which religion is capable." 
But whether it is nonsense or reality, it is Jesus' 
idea of God. The question is, then, how do we 
know that Jesus' idea of God is true? 

We know that Jesus' idea of God is true in the 
same way that we know that anything is true. A 
dish of food is set before us. We are told that it 
is nourishing. Maybe it is; we do not know; the 
only way we can prove it is to eat it. If good 
digestion follows tastiness, and health follows 
both, then we know that the cook spoke truly; the 



158 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

proof of the pudding is the eating of it. You are 
taught that the square on the hypothenuse of a 
right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the 
squares on the other two sides; maybe it is; you 
do not know ; the only way you can prove it is to 
work it out. You lay out your triangle on paper ; 
the base is four inches, the perpendicular is three, 
the hypothenuse is five; the square of four is six- 
teen; the square of three is nine, and sixteen and 
nine are twenty-five, which is the square on the 
hypothenuse. You know the theorem is true be- 
cause it works. The plain man counts anything 
true that makes good in experience; the common 
test of truth is practicalness. 

And science has the identical method. First 
science collects specimens, then it draws an infer- 
ence, then it makes an hypothesis and at last it veri- 
fies the hypothesis by experiment; if the theory 
works, science settles it among its accepted laws. 
It was in 1666 in the town of Woolsthorpe that 
Isaac Newton noticed an apple fall from a tree. 
That set him thinking why it was that bodies in 
falling always fell toward the earth's center. He 
developed a theory that particles of matter attract 
one another according to a certain mathematical 
rule. Then arose the question, is this true? If 
it was true it would account for the fact that the 
moon was retained in its orbit around the earth. 
So Newton began a series of experiments. But the 



THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 159 

first of these experiments went to prove that gravi- 
tation did not work; and, as he himself says, " I 
laid aside at that time any further thoughts of this 
matter." But in 1679 Newton was involved in a 
discussion which led him to think again about his 
discarded theory. Sir Christopher Wren tested 
it, and Halley and Hooke, and at last it was seen 
to be the law by which nature always worked. 
The theory had been true all along, just as New- 
ton had formulated it at first; the hitch in the 
beginning had been due to an error in data given 
to him by an assistant. In 1686 the Royal So- 
ciety adopted the truth of the law of gravitation 
as " past dispute." Why had Newton first thrown 
it aside? Because it appeared not to work. Why 
did the Royal Society finally give it a place among 
the recognized laws of nature? Because it worked. 
And so the plain man's proof and the scientist's, 
the highest proof which can be offered for any 
idea, is that it works. 

And religion uses the same proof, welcomes 
the same test. " Come and see," said Philip, 
when the critical Nathanael said, " Can any good 
thing come out of Nazareth ? " When John 
Baptist first met Jesus he believed in Him at first 
sight. But not long after that first meeting, John 
Baptist was cast into prison, and the gloom of that 
experience bred in him doubts of his first im- 
pression. So he sent friends to Jesus asking, is 



160 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

it true ? " Art Thou He that cometh or look we 
for another ? " When the messengers came to 
Jesus He was standing where the village folk had 
gathered against His coming their deaf and dumb, 
their palsied and lunatic. Pausing in His gra- 
cious labor, the Master replied, " Go and tell John 
the things which ye hear and see ; the blind receive 
their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are 
cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are 
raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached 
to them." The Lord met the challenge with the 
highest proof; if He claimed anything, He made 
good. 

We apply this test of truth to Jesus' idea of 
God. What will it do with the man who believes 
it? Will it make any practical difference to a 
man to believe that God is his Father and all 
men's? Let him really commit himself to the 
idea as he commits himself to the idea that two 
and two are four, what will happen ? Two things 
will happen, the man will become more a man 
than ever, and the man will become more a 
brother than ever. 

The man who believes in God's Fatherhood 
will be more a man than ever. That is, he 
will me less animal, more human; he will 
live less for the things that rot and wear out, 
and more for the things which abide, the timeless 
realities of faith and hope and love; he will think 



THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA l6l 

less of the outward life, and more of the inward 
life, less of comfort, convenience, prudence, and 
profit, more of character and conduct, duty, purity 
and righteousness. Calling God his Father will 
make him realize that God cannot live without him 
any better than he can live with God. In God 
as his Eternal kinsman he will rediscover his in- 
dividuality and revalue his personality. In the 
deep sense of this divine relationship he will find a 
new meaning for his thought, affection and will. 
For the first time he will really know himself, 
what he is, what he is made for, what he ought to 
be. 

The sense of this eternal kinship will not mean 
mystic absorption in the Infinite, loss of self in an 
Eternal All; but it will mean the finding of self 
as a son distinct, individual, personal and of in- 
estimable worth to a God who is as distinct, in- 
dividual, personal as himself. With the self- 
knowledge will come a self-appreciation; there 
will be a deepening sensitiveness to sin as a self- 
hurt, as a perversion of his high purpose, and as 
a violation of his exalted relationship. With the 
deepening sense of sin will come a richer humility, 
an ever-growing dependence upon the Eternal 
Love, a strengthening of the sense of union with 
the Unseen, a feeling of trust that makes him live 
without whining, greet the unknown with calm- 
ness, accept the universe with a song. He will 



1 62 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

adapt himself graciously to whatever condition his 
Father calls him to occupy ; he will go abroad fear- 
less, unf retful, unanxious ; he will leave the future 
to take care of itself, knowing that he and it are 
in the hands of a love which is able to do ex- 
ceeding abundantly above what he can ask or 
think. Childlike his heart will upsoar, his 
thoughts outreach for a closer union with the Fa- 
ther's Spirit. In a word, the believer in God's 
Fatherhood will become less body, more soul, less 
material, more spiritual; he will live as a man 
who knows he has a body, but is a soul. 

But to live in this way, to live to be really 
spiritual, all through and through, is to be in the 
current of the universe's upward movement. 
Man, says science, is the consummate efflorescence 
of the age-long process of evolution. True, this 
manhood seems yet in its rudiments; it is not yet 
unqualified master of the world in which it was 
born to reign ; but if the soul be not destined to be 
nature's enthroned king, science knows nothing 
more worthy. " To the keenest powers of mind 
and microscope, to the keenest powers of labora- 
tory and telescope there appears no sign of any 
higher work than this in the universe — the grow- 
ing of a soul." All the effort of the world- 
building forces is concentrated on the culture of 
the spiritual element in man. Then, to live as the 
believer in God's Fatherhood should live, that is, 



THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 163 

to master self, to make the soul drive the body, is 
to add something to the sum of the soul life of the 
world ; it is to be true to the omnipresent spiritual 
trend of nature and human nature; it is to be in 
line with the highest work we can find being done 
in the universe. It works, then, this idea of God's 
Fatherhood ; if Jesus' idea of God is the source of 
the individual's self -discovery and the individual's 
self-mastery, if it makes him true to the noblest 
intention of the world as we know it, then Jesus' 
idea of God is true. 

The man who believes in God's Fatherhood 
will be more a brother than ever. Assume what 
position one may in regard to Jesus' gospel, one 
thing is forever true, that a new appreciation of 
humanity grows up out of the practical acceptance 
of the idea that God is " Our Father." He who 
says " Our Father," really meaning that all men 
are as nearly related to the Eternal as himself, 
finds a deepening reverence for his fellows, a re- 
appraisement of their value in terms of the fif- 
teenth chapter of St. Luke. Because God is all- 
related, the believer is all-related. The disciple 
becomes unclassified. He can know no rich and 
poor, no class and mass, no society and submerged. 
Every man is only man, the imperishable seed of 
the Eternal. A disciple becomes universal. He 
can know no foreigner nor native, no black man 
nor yellow man, no white man nor red man ; every 



1 64 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

man is only man, the brother worth dying for. 
The disciple becomes catholic. He can know no 
churchman nor heathen, nor orthodox nor heretic, 
no saint nor prodigal ; every man is only man, the 
child of " Our Father." To say " Our Father " 
means to be a friend, a friend of every man, a 
friend of all men, without regard to race, condi- 
tion or religion. Love becomes the master pas- 
sion; personal sacrifice to make others happier or 
better, the daily meat and drink. 

The believer in Jesus' God identifies himself 
with the world sorrow and joy, allies himself 
with the world struggle and victory. The sin of 
the world he will hate because it means loss to the 
brothers, and loss to the Father who loves all im- 
partially ; but hating the sin he will love the sinner 
and be ready to lay his life down for his saving 
because the sinner is of infinite value to the Di- 
vine parent. He will bless those who curse him, 
pray for those who despitefully use him, and give 
to rich and poor, to sick and well, to ignorant and 
learned, to thankless and grateful, his time, his 
power, his strength, his friendship because it is 
the family way, the way of the Father who sends 
His rain to just and unjust and shines His sun on 
good and evil. He will reckon every degenerate, 
defective and dependent life a pearl of great price ; 
he will think the best of the worst, hope the best 
for the worst, do the best with the worst, give 



THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 1 65 

the best to the worst. His family crest will be a 
rude Roman Cross stained red and bearing in 
pure white the legend " Our Father." 

But to live in this way, to be a brother all 
through and through is to put one's self in line 
with humanity's upward progress. Man the spe- 
cies, says history, exists for man the individual. 
Sir Henry Maine long ago made it clear that the 
development of society has been uniform in the 
enrichment of the individual's value. The happi- 
ness of society now depends upon the happiness 
of its constituent persons. The slum is a horror 
to the avenue, and the best is restless until the 
worst is better. Then, to live as the believer in 
Jesus' God should live, to increase the worth of 
mankind, to feel brotherhood with the lowliest as 
well as the highest, is to align one's self with the 
evident purpose of this scheme of things. To 
make a soul grow where it looks as if there were 
only a body of brute passions, to make another 
life know its divinity and claim its higher life is 
to fit into the sublimest work history can discover 
among men. It works, then, this idea of God's 
Fatherhood; if Jesus' idea of God is the central 
spring of inclusive love and world brotherhood, 
if it makes one a sharer in the most beautiful 
work human nature can do, then Jesus' idea of 
God is true. 

Teach the God of Jesus until it grows into be- 



1 66 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

lief that begets acts, and the soul attains self- 
mastery, and men become brothers. Impregnate 
a man's will with the idea " Our Father/' and the 
man becomes more spiritual, more neighborly. 
By the logic of science, by the logic of common 
sense, God is our Father of boundless, gratuitous, 
ungrudging love. The Christian life is the final 
proof of the Christian truth. If the world has 
not reached the proof it is because the world has 
never lived the life. But the life has been lived. 
What made that one pure Soul, that one Per- 
fect Brother must be real ; the source of the man- 
hood of the Master, the brotherhood of the Christ 
could not be untrue. The ultimate test of the 
Divine Fatherhood as the highest idea of God 
is the divine character incarnate in a human life. 
That Incarnation has been achieved once; that 
Incarnation having been achieved once, the proof 
of the idea is in every man's hand. He who 
doubts the Fatherhood of God must explain the 
character of Jesus Christ. He who would know 
God as " Our Father," has the deep assurance 
of personal certainty, has the test within reach — 
he is to live in the world as a child in a Father's 
house, he is to live in the world as a child in a 
Father's house full of children. " If any man 
willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teach- 
ing, whether it is of God." 



X 



HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE GOD AND 
FATHER OF JESUS 



"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 

"If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my 
Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and 
make our abode with him." 



HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE GOD AND 
FATHER OF JESUS 

It is one thing to know about an object; it is 
another thing to know the object. In the one 
case you go round about the object, but never 
get into touch with it. In the other case you 
touch the object and become one with it. In the 
first instance you see the thing as a fact; in the 
second instance you feel the thing as a force. 
To know about God is theology. To know God 
is religion. Theology knows about God as a 
fact. Religion knows God as a Father. Evi- 
dently it is a greater thing to have a religion than 
a theology. Science has a theology, and philoso- 
phy and history; every man has a theology; but 
not every man has a religion. 

"A fire-mist and a planet, 
A jelly-fish and a saurian, 
A crystal and a cell, 
And caves where the cavemen dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty 
And a face turned from the clod, — 
Some call it Evolution, 
And others call it God. 
169 



170 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Like tides on a crescent sea-beach 
When the moon is new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in, — 
Come from the mystic ocean, 
Whose rim no foot has trod, — 
Some of us call it Longing, 
And others call it God. 

A picket frozen on duty,. 

A mother starved for her brood,— 

Socrates drinking the hemlock, 

And Jesus on the rood; 

And millions who, humble and nameless, 

The straight, hard pathway trod, — 

Some call it Consecration, 

And others call it God." 

Here is a difference, the difference between the 
knowledge an educated born-blind man has about 
light, and the knowledge a plain man with two 
good eyes has of the sun. The question is how 
can the man who only knows about God come 
to know God; how can he who has said only " O 
God" learn to say "O God thou art my God"; 
how can one become conscious of that ineffable 
relationship of personal peace and splendid use- 
fulness which Jesus feels in calling God, " Our 
Father"? 

Knowledge of God proceeds along the beaten 
path of all knowing. If one desires to make God 
his own, he must go about it in the same way as 
he would to make electricity his own, or a dia- 



HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 171 

mond, or a dinner, or health, or friendship. The 
God-seeker appropriates the supreme value in the 
same manner as he appropriates any life value. 
There are three simple steps to be taken in know- 
ing anything : — first, the one who would know 
must trust the expert who knows ; second, he must 
apply himself to the laws of the object as the ex- 
pert makes them clear; third, he must experiment 
with the object along lines which the expert sug- 
gests. 

The man who would know must trust the ex- 
pert who knows. This is the first step in ac- 
quiring any knowledge. All life begins in trust. 
The life of the forest begins in trust. Any 
woodsman knows how a fawn will follow, and 
even feed out of one's hand where the old doe 
would flee in fear. The life of the waters be- 
gins in trust. When at the fish-hatchery I have 
held my finger gently over the tray containing 
the three months old trout and seen the wee wrig- 
glers cluster about that spot on the surface. Trust 
is sheer instinct; it does not wait for reason; 
it precedes affection; it is born with us full 
grown; to trust is to act naturally, it is to move 
along the line of least resistance. So the first 
step in all knowing is trust. 

A lad determines to know electricity; that is 
he wants to feel that electricity exists for him, 
that he can use it, light homes with it, send it 



172 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

over the sea with messages, harness it to wheels 
and make it haul loads across continents. So the 
lad consults an expert. He knows the expert 
because the expert makes electricity work, he does 
with electricity what the lad wants to do. The 
expert lights homes with it, he sends it running 
round the world with men's messages; he bids 
it carry freight and passengers from city to city. 
And the lad goes to this expert and takes him at 
his word, trusts him completely and so begins 
to know electricity. And in this same simple 
way by which every value of life is appropriated 
a man begins to know God. He determines to 
trust the expert in God, that is the one who knows 
God as he would know Him, who can do with 
God the things that he would do. The proof 
that Jesus is the expert in God is in the begin- 
ner's hands. To Jesus God was more real than 
mother. Once when she chided Him for for- 
getting her, He answered wonderingly, " Wist ye 
not that I must be in my Father's house?" 
He believed that God and He were related as 
Father and Son, that the Father's business was 
His business, that His message was the Father's 
word. And His idea worked. By that idea of 
the divine Fatherhood He lived as one who knew 
no inward unrest; He had no hesitation in the 
face of life's pain, no quarrel with life's hard- 
ship. The outward life seemed to Him only an ac- 



HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 1 73 

cident, a temporary incident in the career of the 
inward, the inward was the real thing, not time 
but eternity was its sphere of activity. And so 
the thought of the Infinite Father brought Him 
a deep peace which passed understanding and 
made Him more manly than any man who had 
ever lived. 

And this idea of God's Fatherly care made 
Him more a brother than any other man. 
He worked for no wage, for no thanks even, but 
only because every last prodigal was worth while 
as the Father's child and His brother; He be- 
came known as the man who " went about doing 
good " ; He was nicknamed the " friend of pub- 
licans and sinners/' So Jesus' knowledge of God 
made a difference, a difference in His own life 
and others'; and it is that practical difference 
His knowledge made which proves Him to be 
the soul's expert in God. The beginning of re- 
ligion is taking the Master at His word about 
God. The first step in knowing the Father is 
trusting the Son. 

But after trust comes attention, application. 
We appropriate what we attend to ; we know what 
we apply ourselves to. Here is the student of 
electricity. He has gone to the expert to take 
his word for granted. But that is only the be- 
ginning. Now he must attend to the teaching 
about electricity; he must apply his mind to the 



174 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

study of its habits, laws and ways of working 
as these are elucidated by the expert; he must 
familiarize himself with the instructor's idea. 
Only so much of his teacher's knowledge will be- 
come his as he attends to. If the student spends 
all his time in outside work, if he is all the time 
thinking how he will dress, or what he will 
eat, if he uses up all his energy on the athletic 
field he will not know electricity; he must dili- 
gently concentrate his thought upon the lectures 
and text-books. Application is the everlasting 
price of knowledge. A man loves music to-day; 
he can understand what Handel meant when he 
said that as he wrote the Hallelujah Chorus he 
saw the heavens opened and the angels and the 
great God Himself. But this man can remember 
the first time he heard " The Messiah." He went 
to the music hall because a friend told him that 
he ought to go. As he listened to the oratorio 
for the first time, he wondered whether the stu- 
pidity was chargeable to the friend who enjoyed 
it so deeply or to himself to whom it was just so 
much meaningless sound. And yet here and 
there some strain came out and stayed with him 
after he had gone away, and that strain kept 
singing itself over and over to him. Then be- 
cause he wanted to love music, and to under- 
stand it, he went again and again, and the thing 
grew on him, and one night as he sat in the hall, 



HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 1 75 

it seemed as if the walls fell away, and the air 
was full of a drift of white-winged angels, and 
the sound of voices which no man could number 
was coming down out of the skies and singing 
in his soul, " The Lord God Omnipotent reign- 
eth." 

And in this same way a man must go on to 
know the Father of Jesus Christ. One must stay 
with Him until His idea of God becomes familiar 
to him, thought of his thought, master of his 
affection. He cannot get that idea and keep it if 
he spends all his time in the mere making of a 
living, if he uses the world as a mere kitchen, 
or office, or work-shop, or play-ground and never 
pulls down the screens and closes the doors and 
uses life for a school-room where he shall see no 
man save Jesus only. The God-seeker must 
dwell in the student atmosphere; he must take 
some time every day to think, to let his undis- 
tracted eye rest on the Master till He fills his 
vision stern as the Judgment Day yet infinitely 
gentle, solemn as Gethsemane and yet transfig- 
ured with Easter glory, his Master, Victim, Eter- 
nal Judge. Once Wordsworth chided England 
for losing her love of nature — 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; 
Little we see in nature that is ours, 
We have given our hearts away a sordid boon." 



176 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Change " nature " in the third line to " Jesus " and 
it is just as true. He who would know Jesus' God 
as the Master knew Him must not only trust the 
Master, but he must study the Master as He works 
with God. 

Then after trust and attention comes experi- 
ment. He who would know must work with the 
object along the lines which the expert has made 
clear. This is the climax, the ultimate step by 
which the student becomes the worker. It is the 
experimenter to whom knowledge about becomes 
knowledge of; it is the man who works with the 
fact who feels its force. The student has trusted 
the electrician; he has studied his idea until it 
has become thought of his thought ; he has learned 
the habits of electricity so that he knows what to 
expect of it, what it will expect of him. Now 
it remains only for him to work with the mys- 
terious fluid, to obey what he has been taught to 
believe. He goes out into life; he gives this 
electricity wires, insulators, dynamos, batteries, 
and lo, he knows it, he uses it, it is his ; it is part 
of himself; he is part of it. With it he can make 
for men another eye to see what their two eyes 
could not possibly discover ; with it he can give to 
men another voice with which they speak farther 
than their own voice could possibly reach ; with it 
he can give to men other limbs so that they can 
go where their own limbs can not possibly carry 



HO W A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 177 

them. For this experimenter, this man who 
works with electricity, it is no longer a mere fact 
known about, it is a force known and felt. It 
is his obedience, his willing and active commitment 
to it which has made the change between him 
and it. 

What can that mean for the God-seeker but 
that he must work with God as Jesus gives us 
to understand God, that he shall use God as his 
Father and the Father of all men. It means that 
he shall live in the world as a child and not as 
an orphan ; he shall live as if God lived and cared 
how he did, where he went and what he had; he 
shall live without fret or fear; he shall live as a 
share-holder in the eternal and not as a slave 
of time. It means too that he shall live in the 
world as a brother of all men; the honor of the 
family shall be his ideal, the glory of the Father 
his joy, the happiness and holiness of the brothers 
his untiring care and service; he shall feel the 
world's claim on him, the world's right to his 
wealth, his health, his learning, his faith; he shall 
be a lifter not a leaner, a giver not a getter. 

It is the persistent experimenter who gets the 
proof. Sixty years ago no human eye had seen 
Neptune, that blazing orb which unobserved stands 
sentry on the frontier of our solar system. 
Men thought, maybe something like it might be 
there, but no one knew, no one dared say, because 



178 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

no one had seen. On the evening of August 31, 
1846, Le Verrier the French mathematician sat in 
his library deep in calculations along the line of 
the law of gravitation. Before he quit his room, 
he bent over a map of the skies and making a 
mark where now we know Neptune to be he told 
the world that they would find a planet there; 
but no eye saw it, no glass discovered it. Some- 
time after a German astronomer with a new tel- 
escope pointed it at the exact spot indicated on 
Le Verrier's map, and there flew down the brass 
tube the first ray from the great planet which ever 
pricked human vision. Experimentation proved 
what sight seemed to declare untrue. 

So for the man who will take Jesus' idea of 
God and work with it, live in the world as in a 
Father's house, live in the world as in a Father's 
house full of children, live in trust and love there 
will come the vision of the Father's hand on 
everything in life and death. To know Jesus' 
peace and Jesus' power, one must know Jesus' 
God; for this knowledge there are three steps, 
trust, attention, obedience, and of these three the 
greatest is obedience, for it is by loving and only 
by loving that a man can know that God is love. 



XI 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING IN 
THE GOD AND FATHER OF JESUS 



" Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father 
is perfect." 



XI 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING IN 
THE GOD AND FATHER OF JESUS 

There is no Christian doctrine for which you 
could get so many men to vote as the Father- 
hood of God. Nothing can exhaust the name 
" Father." It is the gladdest, but the greatest, 
the dearest, but the deepest, the sweetest, but the 
solemnest, name men can frame to fit God. We 
cannot put too much into the word, but we can 
put too little into it. 

There are two kinds of men who put too little 
into the idea of God's Fatherhood. The first 
man is he who prefers to think of God as judge. 
To call God a Father, he thinks, is to enthrone 
indulgence. He views the doctrine with suspi- 
cion lest it rob God of authority, draw the red 
out of sin, and relieve the cautery of conscience. 
This man deplores the universal note in the 
preaching of Jesus' idea of God. If he preached 
it, he would make it an esoteric doctrine to be 
mentioned only to those who had been initiated 
by conversion into the secrets of grace. 

181 



1 82 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

The second man who puts too little into the 
name " Father " is he who sees nothing in Father- 
hood but sentiment. He thinks God too soft- 
hearted to rule, a doting grandfather too weak 
to punish. This man has the idea that love is 
too tender to blame a man for edging off when 
goodness hurts, costs, or is unprofitable. For this 
second man the thought of God as a Father 
makes life a game, the world a playground and 
the infinite pity ground for infinite excuse. To 
these two it needs to be said, this article of the 
creed, " I believe in God the Father Almighty " 
is the most precious and the most perilous for us 
to repeat, and for three reasons. 

First — it is a serious thing to believe in Jesus' 
idea of God's Fatherhood, because he who claims 
God as Father must be ready to answer the ques- 
tion, What kind of a son are you? 

Fatherhood is something that we never think 
of when we talk about animals. The parent of a 
boy we call a father. The parent of a foal we 
call a sire. Here is a difference. The idea 
" father " suggests care, affection and fore- 
thought. The idea " sire " suggests only pro- 
creation. We do not expect the colt's sire to care 
for him, to exhibit affection or to take thought 
for his future. But if a man treated his son as 
a horse treats his young we would say of that 
man, he has never been a father to the boy. He 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 1 83 

had done all that the animal did for his offspring, 
but he had left undone those things which make 
fatherhood. And those things involve character, 
they imply faith, hope and love, they are not 
physical, but spiritual activities. 

By the same sign you never call a young horse 
a " son " ; he is a " foal." The idea " son " sug- 
gests gratitude, loyalty and obedience. The idea 
of " foal " suggests only animal descent. We 
do not expect the colt to exhibit gratitude to his 
sire, to abide in the same stable or to evidence 
obedience to him. But if a youth treated his 
father as a young horse treats his parents we 
would say of that youth, he is inhuman. He 
might do all that the animal did for his progeni- 
tor, but he would have left undone those things 
which make human sonship. And those things 
involve character, they imply trust, affection and 
filial submission, and these things are not physical, 
but spiritual activities. 

So then, fatherhood involves a relationship and 
that relationship involves something owed on both 
sides. If I have a father, there is due me from 
that father all that fatherhood implies. If I am 
a son there is due my father all that sonship im- 
plies. This relationship involves mutual care, 
affection and taste. It claims reciprocity in char- 
acter. Can the relationship with God expect less ? 
The idea of fatherhood is like the general rule 



1 84 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

about the square of the hypothenuse of a right- 
angled triangle. Whether it be a right-angled 
triangle drawn on a child's blackboard or a right- 
angled triangle formed by three stars in the Milky 
Way the rule works — the square on the hypoth- 
enuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the 
sum of the squares of the other two sides. This 
father and son relationship, like mathematics, 
works everywhere, on the earth, in the heavens. 

I cannot say " Father," until I have begun to 
answer his call " son " ; His Fatherhood does not 
exist for me until I have made my sonship exist for 
Him, until I have shared in His character. He 
is spirit and I must be spirit too ; something more 
than a body to be warmed, clothed and fed ; some- 
thing more than an animal to fight like a dog, 
root like a pig, sing like a bird, or hive like a 
bee. I must be the child of the Eternal Spirit, 
the son of Infinite Faith, Infinite Hope, Infinite 
Love. A father's rights are unquestioned, abso- 
lute, ungiven. He has the right to expect every- 
thing to be reciprocated that He has given to us. 
The old fundamental need of personal struggle, 
personal consecration, personal holiness is doubled. 
Life is more critical than ever. I have no loop- 
hole to crawl out of; the lines are tightly drawn, 
I must be in my world what He is in His uni- 
verse. 

From Sinai, it is said, the smoke ascended as 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 1 85 

from a furnace, and the mountain quaked greatly 
when out of a thick cloud with thunderings and 
lightnings the King gave His command to Israel. 
On a hillside sweet with the peaceful odors of 
plowed field, quiet save for the pipings of the 
birds, under a blue Syrian sky which mirrored its 
fair sun in Galilee's lake, the Father spoke through 
His great Son His will for the family. Yet, I 
think Sinai's " thou shalt not kill " were easier to 
listen to than Jesus' " blessed are the merciful," 
the King's words, " thou shalt not commit adul- 
tery," less than the Father's " the pure in heart 
shall see God," the Sovereign's word, " thou shalt 
have no other gods before me " as an ant-hill to 
the snow-capped Alpine summit, " Ye shall be 
perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." 

It is a serious thing to believe in Jesus' idea of 
God's Fatherhood, because he who claims God as 
his Father must be ready to answer this question : 
What kind of a son are you? 

Second — It is a serious thing to believe in 
Jesus' idea of God's Fatherhood, because it com- 
mits a man to living his life in absolute unself- 
ishness. Given a father, and what follows? 
What an alchemist is a new-born babe. The 
touch of those tiny fingers transmutes the base 
metal of thought of self into the pure gold of 
thought of the unself. From the moment when 
his first babe's first cry summons the instinct of 



1 86 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

fatherhood in a man's bosom that man must 
deny himself, he must henceforth lose himself in 
another. Love, once a mere passion of posses- 
sion, is re-born a passion for self-sacrifice. This 
father has a family, and it is the family, the home, 
the health of the whole which become his chiefest 
concern. Given a son, and what follows? What 
must be the true son's concern? Surely it is the 
same as his father's. The father no more than the 
son, the son no less than the father, exists for that 
home. He must feel how every thought, word 
and act, though made in secret, is adding to or 
subtracting something from the honor of the 
home. It is this mutual instinct of being sup- 
ported and supporting which makes us sing 
" There is no place like home." 

So here, again, the axiom of the earthly re- 
lationship we call home is true for the celestial 
relationship we call religion. This is the exten- 
sion of the old fifth commandment in religion — 
" Love your enemies and pray for them that per- 
secute you; that ye may be sons of your Father 
who is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise 
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the 
just and the unjust." 

Like God the Father, the Son must have a love 
that is boundless, gratuitous and ungrudging. 
The family, not one favorite here and another 
there, but all the members must receive without 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 1 87 

bias, be blessed without prejudice, be cared for 
without favoritism. The son must live so that 
no man can be poorer, no woman sadder, no child 
more wretched for aught he has done or left un- 
done. He must live so that through his words 
and deeds men may see truth, reverence purity, 
and possess the means of happiness, and he must 
so live not for profit, prudence nor popularity; he 
must so live though it means a curse, a crown of 
thorns and a cross. 

And if we seek to know what that means, what 
sonship involves, we go to Him who taught us 
to say " Our Father." His life is just spent in 
going about doing good ; He does so much for the 
imperfect, the defective, the degenerate, that they 
call Him " friend of publicans and sinners." He 
spends His life giving, giving until when He 
comes to die He has nothing worth gambling for 
but His cloak. That day He died, the men He 
had lived for led Him away like a lamb to the 
slaughter. And while they were making the 
wounds for Him to hang by He prayed, " Father 
forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
And that is the living picture of sonship, and 
what it means to say, " I believe in God the 
Father Almighty." 

Those who fear this broad truth lest it make 
men morally slothful, those who greet the Sermon 
on the Mount boisterously as " religion enough 



1 88 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

for me," must see what the sonship is to which 
this idea of God summons us. Standing with 
His arms around poverty, uncleanness and social 
leprosy, the Father's great Son calls: "Follow 
me." " 

It is a serious thing to believe in Jesus' idea of 
God's Fatherhood, because he who claims God as 
his Father is committed to living his life in abso- 
lute unselfishness. 

In the last place — it is a serious thing to be- 
lieve in Jesus' idea of God's Fatherhood, because 
it means that God's perfectness consists in His 
impartial love and love is the most awful thing 
in the world. It has been said " Be afraid of the 
love that loves you; it is either your heaven or 
your hell. The lives of men are never the same 
after they have let themselves be loved; if they 
are not better they are worse. For this is the 
mystery of love, its paradox — while it is the 
greatest thing in the world it is the most help- 
less." For the love of her child, without thought of 
the cost, a mother would give her own life in ex- 
change; and yet she must stand at its death bed 
with helpless hands when the heart spring un- 
winds and the little life runs down. A father 
would give his fortune, his blood to keep his son's 
heart clean and white, but all his paternal passion 
cannot check that son's mad pace, if the boy's 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 189 

lusts take the bit between their teeth and drag 
him along the edge of the moral precipice. A 
son may leave home ; a despot can drag him back ; 
a father can only wait and watch and keep the 
door ajar. We shrink to apply all we know of the 
weakness of human love to the divine. Yet 
it was through a man the Father made His love 
plain to us. He came, the Christ, to His own 
and they received Him not. He loved His 
own, loved them to the end, and yet at the end 
they deserted Him, betrayed Him, hung Him on 
a cross. 

The Tuesday before the Friday when they 
nailed Him between two thieves, He was stand- 
ing in the temple at Jerusalem. Did He love that 
fair, rebellious city? We may never know how 
great was that love. Could He save that imper- 
illed city? Jerusalem had bound Love's hands 
with indifference so that He could not reach out 
to rescue her ; she had tethered His feet with hate 
so that He could only stand still and watch her 
singing into the gulf that Titus was to dig. 
Stand close to the Christ as He speaks — you see 
He is draining love's bitterest cup; He is realiz- 
ing love's helplessness, " it is the wail of a heart 
wounded because its love has been despised " and 
it cannot avert the doom which impends over those 
it loves. " Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! how often 



190 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

would I have gathered thy children as a hen 
gathered her chickens, and ye would not. Be- 
hold, your house is left unto you desolate." 

Men say they cannot believe in a hell, because 
a father never could send a child to dwell there. 
The inference is true. The Father never has sent 
and never will send men to misery, but that makes 
a hell no less real. When the sun shines on a 
thing and it does not grow, we know that thing 
is dead. When love breathes on a life and that 
life does not respond, we know that the soul in it 
is stone. " Believe, then," as a great liberal theo- 
logian puts it, " in hell, because you believe in the 
love of God — not in a hell to which God con- 
demns men of His will and pleasure, but a hell into 
which men cast themselves from the very face 
of His love in Jesus Christ. The place has been 
painted as a place of fires. But when we con- 
template that men come to it with the holiest 
flames in their nature quenched, we shall justly 
feel that it is rather a dreary waste of ash and 
cinder, strewn with snow — some ribbed and 
frosted arctic zone, silent in death for there is no 
life there, and there is no life there because there 
is no love, and no love because men in rejecting 
or abusing her have slain their own power ever 
again to feel her presence." 

It is a serious thing to believe in the Father- 
hood of God, because this belief involves sonship, 



THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 191 

and sonship involves brotherhood, and brother- 
hood involves living for the spirit behind things, 
for the higher life, the eternal kind on which 
death lays no hand, on which the grave has no 
claim. 

Oh, the exactingness of this service. If a man 
would have an easy religion let him not take this 
article with which to begin his creed — "I be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty." For if he 
give himself to a Father God, a God who loves as 
did the Man of Nazareth, his " yeses " and " noes " 
his ideas of right and wrong will be searched with 
fingers of fire, he will hear a voice calling to his 
thoughts, his wishes, his will, " higher," " higher," 
he will see a vision of an ideal and he will feel 
that ideal draw him with hooks of steel to make 
himself perfect with God's perfectness. 

"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Mas- 
ter shall blame; 

And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work 
for fame; 

But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his 
separate star, 

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things 
as They are." 



XII 

THE RELIGION OF JESUS THE ABSO- 
LUTE RELIGION 



" Our Father who art in heaven." 

" Go ye, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing 
them into the name of the Father and of the Son and 
of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things 
whatsoever I commanded you: and Lo, I am with you 
always, even unto the consummation of the age." 

" Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in 
me: or else believe me for the very works' sake." 

" I have given you an example, that ye also should do as 
I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A 
servant is not greater than his lord; neither one that is 
sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, 
blessed are ye if ye do them." 



XII 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS THE ABSO- 
LUTE RELIGION 

Obvious as the supremacy of the religion of 
Jesus may be for some, it must be frankly admitted 
that it is not so obvious to all men. Outside of 
the church not only but within its communion the 
question is being asked, can Christianity's claim 
to be the absolute religion justify itself to intelli- 
gence, in plain language, is Christianity played 
out? And there is not a little in appearances 
which makes a brief for pessimism. There is the 
fact that after nearly two thousand years certain 
non-Christian faiths have a larger membership, 
and their collective following overwhelms ours. 
Among the Western people where its influence has 
been greatest controversy has beaten upon Chris- 
tianity, sectarian discord has wounded it, govern- 
ments which profess to be its defenders tear into 
tatters its elementary principles, and men and 
women who have publicly confessed its faith dis- 
credit it with lives which mock its Master's ideals. 

And, as if this were not enough to cast sus- 
picion upon the finality of the Christian religion, 

195 



196 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

a challenge comes from the Far East. Above that 
horizon has risen a heathen nation. And as she 
stands in the glory of her youth as a world-power, 
lo, she compares favorably with and rises superior 
to certain so-called Christian nations which have 
from time to time aspired to conquer her, even to 
convert her. The extraordinary development of 
Japan with its alien faith may not be explained 
by mere intellectual causes. It has been inspired 
by an unsurpassed patriotism, sustained by the 
noblest self-sacrifice and glorified by a humani- 
tarianism which almost reaches up to America's 
unprecedented attitude toward Cuba and the 
Philippines. Such facts make even Christians ask 
if after all their religion be not only a passing 
phase of civilization, if it be not a provisional 
though a Providential revelation. 

This is the question which the disciple must an- 
swer, is the religion of Jesus the absolute religion 
or is the world to expect a new religion? For 
effective service there is need not only of arms and 
men but the force must be vitalized by an unques- 
tioning confidence in the unique ability of the com- 
mander. Doubt of. the general's qualifications cuts 
the nerve of daring. When the army believes that 
its commanding officer is not only brave but that 
he is the only man who can lead them on to victory 
something gets done. Faith has a way of making 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 197 

the result come true. Doubt and though you are 
right you do not dare. Unqualified commitment 
to the mind of Christ as the ultimate standard and 
spiritual dynamic is the sole condition of Christ- 
like character and efficient evangelization. If they 
themselves are to come into " the measure of the 
stature of His fulness/' if they are to win the 
world for allegiance to their Lord, Christians have 
got to believe that His religion is the one absolute 
faith for mankind. 

They must believe that the religion of Jesus is 
absolute as opposed to provisional; that is, that 
Christianity is not a phase of developing civiliza- 
tion, a faith for a temporary emergency of the 
race. They must see it as the indispensable re- 
ligion for which in the future there will be no 
substitute as there has been none in the past. 
Christians must believe that the religion of Jesus 
is absolute as opposed to provincial; that is, that 
Christianity is not a racial cult, a faith for a certain 
type of mind and class of feeling. They must see 
it as the universal religion whose field has no 
boundary but the earth's round ring. Christians 
must believe that the religion of Jesus is absolute 
as opposed to partial; that is, that Christianity is 
not a mere forerunner of a larger religion, a faith 
only for beginners in spiritual evolution. They 
must see it as the consummate religion having 



198 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

within its keeping the answer to the ultimate prob- 
lems of the inward life, the promise of the per- 
fecting of mankind. 

Of course the religion which aspires to this ex- 
alted function must measure up to certain require- 
ments. The faith that claims to be absolute must 
stand a fourfold test. First, the absolute religion 
must have a God, for the race is " incurably re- 
ligious." No mere moral code nor social pro- 
gramme however altruistic can become an absolute 
religion if it is godless. In its center it must en- 
throne an Infinite Power and Pity to whom the 
human heart can aspire and pray. It is not neces- 
sary to prove that no tribe of men has ever been 
found who had not some sense of a relationship 
to an awful Unseen. It is necessary only to know 
that there are some men who will cry, " thou hast 
made us for Thyself and we are restless till we 
rest in Thee." Given one human soul who de- 
mands God and the absolute religion must supply 
the goods. And this God of the absolute religion 
must be an Infinite and Eternal Presence who may 
be known by and who knows every last child of 
man, a Person in whom, by whom and through 
whom are all things, a Being the secret of whose 
purpose includes every living soul. The absolute 
religion must have a God for all men to love and 
obey. 

Second, the absolute religion must have a world- 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 199 

wide message, founded upon the conception of the 
infinite value of the individual. For in the erec- 
tion of a world-wide ideal the unit of the building 
is not the state, nor a class, nor even the family, 
but the individual, the man without distinction 
of race, color, or condition. A world-wide ideal 
can be no higher than its estimate of a single soul. 
Any social programme which values one class more 
than another, which lifts one kind of men at the 
expense of the rest, which depreciates the individ- 
ual however conditioned is disqualified from being 
the absolute religion. The absolute religion must 
have a world-wide message founded upon a con- 
ception of the infinite value of the individual. 

Third, the absolute religion must be consistent 
with reality, it must be founded on fact which may 
be tested by the plain man's test of truth. It must 
be consistent with the truth, the whole truth and 
nothing but the truth. Piety without intelligence 
is fanatic and divisive. Criticism is normal and 
it is as inevitable as the sea. Like the sea its tide 
will search the outlines of creeds as the tide sub- 
merges the sand forts of children playing war upon 
the beach. It will rise against and at last close 
over every authority which is not rock-ribbed and 
lifted high into the blinding light of the eternal 
sun. Before its swelling flood only that remains 
intact which concurs with reality. The absolute 
religion must be founded on fact. 



200 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Fourth, the absolute religion must have an un- 
sparing ethical ideal. In a word faith in it must 
make the best men. This, as we have seen, is the 
ultimate test of any religion. Whatever argument 
may be adduced for a doctrine, it would instantly 
lose its force if it appeared that the moral result 
of denying that doctrine was superior to that which 
resulted from its acceptance. Unless men are mor- 
ally better for their faith, they will not long be- 
lieve in that faith, and they will not get others to 
repeat its creed. Only the highest character-mak- 
ing creed can survive. The race will eventually 
tire of appeasings the gods and begin to demand 
that religionists be simply good. The absolute re- 
ligion must have an unsparing ethical ideal. 

These four things the absolute religion must 
fulfil. If it is pregnable in any one of these four 
dimensions it will be forced eventually to capitu- 
late. No amount of strength massed on three 
sides will save it from the invasion of ultimate 
oblivion on its weak side. To be absolute a re- 
ligion must be four-square to every wind that 
blows. At the bar of this quadrilateral at least 
five great religions stand and each claims to be 
the religion for mankind. 

Islam is one. Its definition of God would make 
little change in the definition given in the West- 
minster Shorter Catechism. But the violent re- 
pulsion which the Western heart experiences at 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 201 

the mention of Mohammedanism is sufficient to 
disqualify Islam as a universal faith were it not 
already rendered unfit by the third and fourth re- 
quirements for an absolute religion. The absolute 
religion must be consistent with reality, but Islam's 
Koran is a tissue of absurdities. The absolute 
religion must have an unsparing ethical ideal, but 
Islam permits polygamy, and its only salvation is 
escape from future punishment by the appeasing 
of a supreme despot. 

Hinduism which has basked for centuries in 
the aromatic airs of India brings its devotees a 
peace which passeth understanding; its prayers 
Christians might repeat, and its religious experi- 
ences are fervent and profound; its method of 
contemplation satisfies a deep desire and need of 
the human soul. But the very fact that with a 
history half as long again as Christianity's Hindu- 
ism has failed to save its own land disables it as 
the absolute religion, if it were not inherently dis- 
qualified by the second requirement of an absolute 
religion. The absolute religion must have a 
world-wide message founded on a conception of 
the infinite value of the individual, but Hinduism 
seeks no converts; it is essentially aristocratic; its 
favored initiates leave the world about them to 
wallow in brute passion, to be enslaved by caste 
and to wander hopelessly in the utter darkness of 
superstition. 



202 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

Buddhism, the eclectic faith, the amorphous re- 
ligion, the sad comfort of the disillusioned, whose 
end is extinction and whose method is renuncia- 
tion, fosters something which looks like the Chris- 
tian grace of charity. But that Japan after cen- 
turies of Buddhism is proverbially unchaste is 
enough to rule out Buddhism as a universal faith, 
if it were not already unfitted by the same standard 
as Hinduism. For Buddhism is also a religion for 
the privileged, with no valuation of the individual. 

Confucianism, the religion of order, makes laws 
of filial reverence which put to shame the customs 
of our Western peoples. But to remember that 
China whose religion Confucianism has been for 
centuries before Christ must in these latter days 
repudiate its fundamental principle that she may 
permit herself to progress is enough to disbar Con- 
fucianism, were it not already thrown out of court 
by the first requirement of an absolute religion. 
The absolute religion must have a God for all 
men to love and obey, but Confucianism is essen- 
tially atheistic ; its indefinable Supreme has no place 
in and no active part with the governance of the 
universe. 

But what of Christianity? And first we must 
remind ourselves of the fact that Christianity is 
not modern civilization. Prof. G. W. Knox puts 
the case thus, " No doubt modern civilization owes 
much to our religion, but it is not a Christian 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 203 

civilization. Many of its elements are of other 
origins and some of them are directly antagonistic 
to its fundamental principles. The proof which 
takes our particular form of modern life as the 
fruit of the teaching of Christ at once claims too 
much and too little, too much for our social con- 
dition, and too little for the Christian ideal. It 
were indeed the greatest evidence against Chris- 
tianity, could our civilization be claimed as its 
fruits, precisely as China is the gravest indictment 
against the Confucian system. The highest claim 
of our faith is that it is a protest still, indignant 
and uncompromising, against not only the ex- 
crescences, but against much of the essential char- 
acter of the modern world." The best that can 
be said for civilization is that it is being Chris- 
tianized. Still must St. Paul's words ring round 
the Western world, " Thou that teachest another, 
teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a 
man should not steal, dost thou steal? thou that 
say est a man should not commit adultery, dost thou 
commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost 
thou rob temples? thou that gloriest in the law, 
through thy transgression of the law dishonorest 
thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed 
among the Gentiles because of you." Civilization 
is not Christianity. 

We must remind ourselves too, that Christianity 
is not the Church. Among the sects which vainly 



204 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

boast themselves to be the body of Christ we look 
in vain for one which as a Church consistently 
imposes as the sole test of membership in its com- 
munion the standard set up by the Master Him- 
self — "Ye are my friends if ye do the things 
which I command you." In this connection the 
writer already quoted well says, " Christian love 
has neither been a condition of admission, nor has 
its possession in a high degree been any protection 
against discipline and excommunication. It has re- 
mained a counsel for saints otherwise unobjection- 
able, and an attainment to be reached when sanc- 
tification is complete in some life beyond the 
world, but for the most it has remained a thing 
apart, and many who hold St. Paul verbally in- 
spired have uttered indignant remonstrance when 
in accordance with his words love has been set 
forth as the greatest thing in the world." To be a 
Churchman is not synonymous with being a Chris- 
tian, and to be outside the Church is not the same 
as being unchristian. Of the church it must be 
said as we have said of civilization, it is being 
Christianized. The Church is not Christianity. 

What then is Christianity? The answer is and 
must always be, the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, 
the beautiful life the Lord lived illuminated and 
interpreted by the simple words He spoke. Here 
and here only is the Christian truth, the whole 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 205 

truth and nothing but the truth. All faiths must 
come to judgment here. Back to Christ is the 
spirit which must prevail, for it cannot for one 
moment be maintained that Christians have suc- 
ceeded in advancing beyond their Master. His 
life and His idea are still the unattained ideal. 

" Our little systems have their day ; 
They have their day and cease to be : 
They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

This is the absolute religion, the indispensable, 
universal, consummate faith, the faith of our Lord 
Jesus Christ. 

And how does the religion of Jesus measure up 
to the quadrilateral? It was said the absolute 
religion must have a God for all men to love and 
obey. Once more we stand under the Syrian sky 
nineteen hundred years ago. Jesus is alone with 
His disciples; Peter and Andrew the unlettered 
fishermen; John and James the sons of the ship- 
owner of Bethsaida; Matthew the former Roman 
tax-collector; Simon the one-time fanatic nation- 
alist ; Philip the materialist ; Bartholomew the mys- 
tic; Judas the bigot; Thomas the skeptic; and 
Thaddeus and James. They stand praying, Jesus 
leads them : — " Our Father who art in heaven." 
Jesus' Father and John's, Peter's and Matthew's, 
Philip's and Judas'. Evidently Christianity has a 



206 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

God, a God for all kinds of men, a God who knows 
no class, caste, nor creed, a God whom every son 
of man may adore, love and obey. 

It was said that the absolute religion must have 
a world-wide message founded upon a conception 
of the infinite value of the individual. Once more 
we join that group which is bowed in prayer, in 
whose faces we see mirrored the world's varying 
minds and feelings. " Our Father," then that 
word " our " knits those variegated souls into one 
brotherhood, bids them claim relationship to Him, 
God's best Son, and to all the world full of God's 
dear children. " Go ye," said the Christ, " and 
make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them 
into the name of the Father and of the Son and 
of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all 
things whatsoever I commanded you : and lo, I am 
with you always, even unto the consummation of 
the age." Remember His story of the prodigal 
son ; when he " came to himself he said, I will arise 
and go to my Fattier." Was there ever such a 
valuation of the real self of a man whom the men 
about him thought fit only to be a swineherd? 
Obviously the religion of Jesus has a world-wide 
message and it is founded upon a conception of 
the infinite value of the individual. 

It w r as said that the absolute religion must be 
consistent with reality, that it must consent to be 
tested by the plain man's test of truth. In the 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 20J 

beginnings of Jesus' ministry one speaking to 
another said, " We have found Him, of whom 
Moses in the law, and the prophets, wrote, Jesus 
of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." He to whom he 
spoke doubted ; " Come and see," was the answer, 
and going and seeing the doubter identified the dis- 
covery and claimed and was claimed by the Christ. 
On the eve of the day they hanged Him on the 
Cross, the Master said to His disciples, " Believe 
me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me : 
or else believe me for the very works' sake." We 
know the answer He sent to the bewildered John 
Baptist; He submitted to be tested by the plain 
man's test of truth. And for nineteen centuries 
His religion has stood the test. Historical and 
literary study by impartial research have vindicated 
the impregnable validity of the fundamental facts 
of His life as recorded for us in the Gospels. 
Criticism has tried those Gospels by its hottest 
fires and as one of the critics has written, " Let 
the plain Bible-reader continue to read his Gospels 
as he has hitherto read them; for in the end the 
critic cannot read them otherwise What the one 
regards as their true gist and meaning, the other 
must also acknowledge to be so." Not only the 
higher but the highest criticism, the criticism of life 
has proved that the religion of Jesus may be held, 
not as a fragile treasure which must be tenderly 
guarded against the rude attacks of unbelief, but as 



208 THE MIND OF CHRIST 

a fortress whose foundations are imbedded in the 
eternal rock of reality. It must be plain that the 
religion of Jesus is consistent with reality. 

It was said the absolute religion must have an 
unsparing ethical ideal. Once again we go to 
Jesus Himself. What O Sovereign Master of the 
soul is thine ideal for the individual and society? 
" Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy ; but I say unto 
you, Love your enemies and pray for them that 
persecute you ; that ye may be sons of your Father 
who is in heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise 
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the 
just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love 
you, what reward have ye? do not even the pub- 
licans the same? And if ye salute your brethren 
only, what do ye more than others ? Do not even 
the Gentiles the same ? Ye therefore shall be per- 
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Stand 
once again on Calvary where they have hung Him 
on His cross; hear Him praying for those who 
are striking the nails through His hands and feet ; 
remember how just the night before He had given 
this word to His followers, " I have given you an 
example, that ye also should do as I have done to 
you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is 
not greater than his lord; neither one that is sent 
greater than he that sent him. If ye know these 
things, blessed are ye if ye do them. ,, What is the 



THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 20g 

ethical ideal of Christianity? Nothing short of 
Godlike perfection, nothing less than the redupli- 
cation of the Infinite Love of the awesome Eternal. 
The Ten Commandments are left far under foot, 
the golden rule itself is surpassed, this religion's 
moral law sinks into the divine depths, soars away 
into infinite heights, unsurpassed, unsurpassable in 
its reach, for it is as beautiful as the life of the 
Father of Jesus Christ. Surely the religion of 
Jesus has an unsparing ethical ideal. 

Measured by the tests for an absolute religion 
the religion of Jesus not only fulfils but overflows 
all the requirements. Its God is a Father, all 
men's Father, the Father who claims every man, 
whom every man may claim; its message is to all 
men without distinction because every man is of 
inestimable value to the Father; its fundamental 
record and its sublime Author are true, verifiable 
by the criticism of experience; its ethical ideal is 
the ultimate perfection of the spiritual man in the 
likeness of his heavenly Father. A God better 
than Jesus' is inconceivable ; a higher appraisement 
of man than Jesus' is unimaginable ; a more prac- 
tical authority than Jesus' is unthinkable; a more 
elevated ideal of character than Jesus' is impossi- 
ble. Jesus' religion is the absolute religion, indis- 
pensable, universal, consummate. The man who 
will face the facts must say with St. Peter, " Lord, 
to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of 



2IO THE MIND OF CHRIST 

eternal life. And we have believed and know that 
thou art the Holy One of God." 

"Ah no, thou life of the heart, 
Never shalt thou depart! 
Not till the leaven of God 
Shall lighten each human clod: 
Not till the world shall climb 
To thy height serene, sublime, 
Shall the Christ who enters our door 
Pass to return no more." 



THE END 



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